


love me (if that's what you wanna do)

by hamiltrashed



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Also there will be (probably bad) poetry by yours truly, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - No Zombies, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, And angst!, Because these are horny college boys of course there's gonna be angst, Because these are horny college boys of course there's gonna be sex, Blow Jobs, College, Daryl is all about Rick (and also poetry but mostly Rick), Dry Humping, Fingerfucking, First Time, Hand Jobs, Homophobia on the part of other characters (not Rick or Daryl), Inordinate amount of poetry, M/M, Masturbation, Mentions of Daryl's past abuse, Pablo Neruda should probably get a writing credit for this, Pining, Rimming, There will also be sex!, apologies in advance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-06
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-05 10:05:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 56,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5371253
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamiltrashed/pseuds/hamiltrashed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl, poetry lover and academic nerd, has been crushing on Rick, older, straight frat boy extraordinaire since freshman year. When they end up in the same poetry class and are assigned each other as a partner for a project, Daryl is caught between thinking it's a dream come true to spend more time with Rick, and finding himself pining more than he ever has for the boy he can't have. During their time together, Daryl discovers that Rick is far more than just a brainless frat boy, and Rick discovers that he might not be as straight as he thought. But this is college, where love doesn't often survive the semester; will Rick and Daryl be the exception? Or will their differences ultimately tear them apart?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skarlatha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skarlatha/gifts).



> Greetings, loved ones. So this fic is sort of becoming a labour of love for me, and, if you can believe it, basically emerged from [Skarlatha](http://archiveofourown.org/users/skarlatha/pseuds/skarlatha/works) writing me a [college ficlet](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4010236/chapters/11407333), and me thinking LET’S DO A COLLEGE AU WHERE RICK DROOLS ON A TEXTBOOK AND DARYL STILL FINDS HIM HOT. And then it became a beast all its own that includes poetry loving Daryl and frat boy Rick and lots of angst and other feels and probably way too much Pablo Neruda and poetry of my own creation.
> 
> I’d really like to thank my beta, [Michelle_A_Emerlind](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Michelle_A_Emerlind/works), who is ever patient, eternally helpful, and literally the most glorious beta one could hope to have. This is only my second chaptered fic ever, and a good deal longer than my first one, but she’s encouraged me and been extremely excited about it since I started writing it. Bless you, MAE. You are a godsend. **#ahoymatie** (Honorary mention for all my babes in the [Rickyl Writer's Group](http://rickylwritersgroup.tumblr.com/) (join us!) for being so excited to read this; you are my life's blood.) 
> 
> **[Title comes from the lyrics of my fave band The 1975's recent (flawless) single,[Love Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ5bZuUlftI).]**
> 
> Enjoy, everyone! (:

Rick is drooling on his textbook. His face is against the page, mouth wide open, and he’s actually _drooling_ , so deep in sleep that the loud _bang_ of the lecture hall door shutting a minute ago when a student came in late didn’t even stir him. Daryl is watching him with amusement, and with the annoying notion that nobody has ever looked more attractive while drooling on the words of Daryl’s favourite poet. Which is likely the only reason he’s willing to forgive that at all.

Rick had ambled in just as the clock struck 9:30, sat one row down and two seats over from Daryl, giving him a fairly nice vantage point from which to watch Rick take out his textbook, flip through the pages until he got to Neruda, and promptly fall asleep on them thirty seconds later. It’s now 9:50, and Rick is still passed out while the professor continues to teach, a hangover evident in the dark circles under his eyes, his rumpled clothing, and the mess of unwashed, uncombed curls going in every direction. A hungover frat boy really has no licence to be so goddamn gorgeous, but there he is, and it’s kinda ruining Daryl’s life. At the very least, it’s certainly ruining his focus in the class.

A part of Daryl knows he should hate Rick. Rick is the kind of guy who has a sole interest in whatever his major is and zero interest in taking classes that fulfil core requirements (Daryl knows this due to the amount of times he’s overheard Rick complaining about how dumb poetry is, which Daryl thinks is sacrilege). He’s the kind of guy who thinks his fraternity, Delta Something Whatever, is the be-all, end-all of college life. He’s the kind of guy who appears to be about as deep as a glass of water. And all of this is why it’s ten thousand times more irritating that Daryl has an _absurdly_ large crush on him.

Daryl has spoken to Rick a grand total of twice since the semester started nine weeks ago - once when Rick asked to borrow a pen to take notes, and again when Daryl had passed him on the way back to his dorm and Rick had shoved a flier for a frat party into his hand. Daryl had thanked him, but hadn’t gone to the party. Of course, that didn’t stop him from lying in bed that night and wishing he had, if only so he could see Rick for even five more minutes outside of class. And yes, he fully recognises that Rick is becoming a problem for him.

But it’s not his fault, because Rick’s voice is all lush Georgia drawl, and it bothers Daryl just that little bit extra that he doesn’t like poetry. Because Daryl would give the entire exorbitant tuition amount he’s forking over to this university just to hear Rick read some Neruda aloud to him. That’s fantasy number god-only-knows -- Daryl lying in bed with Rick beside him, reading him love poems. And maybe that’s way too goddamn cheesy for anybody, but it doesn’t stop Daryl’s wishful thinking. Rick might be a year above him and about six-thousand years out of his league, but Daryl is stuck on him like superglue.

Daryl’s attention is only drawn back to the front of the classroom when the professor breaks past his Rick-focused barrier, and he hears her asking for someone to read aloud a poem. His hand shoots up immediately; despite the fact that he almost never speaks in class, he doesn’t want to wait for someone else to butcher Neruda’s words with a lacklustre interpretation of the passion in the poetry. But his professor merely glances at him, eyebrow raised, before her eyes skim over to the sleeping boy in the row before him.

“Mr Grimes,” she says, rather loudly. Rick doesn’t move. She raises her voice to a shout. “Rick Grimes!”

Sighing, Daryl balls up a piece of paper, takes careful aim, and lands it right in Rick’s face. If this is his only chance to hear Rick read, he’s not going to let that pass him by. Rick starts awake, looking around wildly, flushing when he realises he’s still in class, and hurriedly wiping drool from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve. “What?” he blurts out, looking confused.

The professor rolls her eyes. “Thank you for your assistance, Mr Dixon. Mr Grimes, please read Neruda’s Sonnet II on page 28. Perhaps you’ll keep us all awake and alert since I’m obviously not doing my job.”

Rick’s cheeks turn pink and he looks down at the book, wiping away the drool from the pages, too. He clears his throat, and in a voice laced with sleep, begins to read. “ _Love, what a long way, to arrive at a kiss, what loneliness-in-motion, toward your company_ …”

His cadence isn’t right, Daryl thinks with some disappointment. There’s no sense of rhythm to the words, and though they sound gorgeous in that voice of his, they also sound listless, bored, not passionate so much as half-dead and still dying.

“... _But you and I, love, we are together from our clothes down to our roots, together in autumn, in water, in hips, until we can be alone together -- only you, only me_.”

“You can stop there, Mr Grimes. Someone else, tell me, what do you think Neruda is saying here?”

Daryl doesn’t raise his hand this time, not only because he thinks it’s obvious what Neruda is saying, but because he’s too busy watching Rick. Rick stretches, rubbing at his eyes, and then picks up the ball of paper that Daryl threw at him, turning around to look at him. Daryl shrinks back in his seat immediately, waits for the world to swallow him up, because this is the first time Rick’s looked at him for longer than two seconds and it’s because Daryl fucking _threw_ something at him. God, how stupid could he be? But Rick just smirks and shakes his head, then turns back toward the front.

Daryl stares a hole into the back of Rick’s head for the rest of the class, thinking there’s no way Rick doesn’t feel his eyes on him, but unable to stop himself. Five minutes before the end of the lecture, his professor grabs his attention once more with two words: _group project_. Daryl doesn’t know whether to send up a prayer to a god he doesn’t believe in to be in a group with Rick, or _not_ to be.

His professor beams around at them all. “Since I get a nice thrill out of torturing my students with projects like these, you’ll be paired up with one other person this semester to work on the poetry project mentioned in the syllabus.”

Daryl swallows hard. _Not_ , then, because there’s no way he can handle himself _alone_ in Rick’s company. He’ll kiss him or confess his undying fucking affection for him or something else wholly embarrassing and weird. And okay, he’s not exactly writing _Daryl Grimes_ across all his notebooks like a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, but he’s rapidly approaching that level after a mere two and half months of having class with Rick. Then again, Daryl _had_ pined for him during the entirety of his freshman year, hoping it was just the novelty of Rick being the cool, straight, frat boy sophomore he couldn’t have, but here he is a year later, and it’s just as bad as it ever was. So really, it’s a surprise and possibly a minor miracle that he hasn’t reached that level already.

There are groans of displeasure echoing around the room, and his professor holds up a hand to silence them all. “Relax, guys, you’ve known there was going to be a project for months. It’s really not going to be that bad. The paper going around in a minute will detail the entire project. I’ll call out your name and your partner’s name, so please raise your hands when I do so you can find one another.”

Daryl’s name is not far down the alphabetised list, so he doesn’t have to wait long. He cringes when she says his name, waiting, waiting…

“Rick Grimes,” his professor says. Daryl’s heart thumps, caught between sinking and trying to dance a fucking samba in his chest. Rick turns around to look at him again, and Daryl, probably the approximate shade of a flamingo by now, gives an awkward little wave.

He ducks his head and looks away when he gets the paper with the project information, taking one and passing the rest along to the student two seats down. He reads it over less-than-carefully, noting something about a poet and writing poetry and he thinks he’ll give it another look when he’s recovered from the mere idea of spending time alone with Rick.

He barely listens as his professor suggests they exchange contact information and dismisses them, focusing on packing his things away and looking anywhere but in Rick’s direction. But this turns out to not matter in the slightest, because Rick climbs over his row of seats and plants himself directly in front of Daryl. Daryl looks up and tries not to die because Rick is barely a foot from him and oh god, his eyes are the most perfect shade of blue in the universe. They might _be_ the universe, or at least hold its secrets.

“Nice throw,” Rick says with an easy smile, by way of breaking whatever ice he perceives there to be. “You play football?”

Daryl snorts, wondering how Rick could possibly even think he plays football looking at his scrawny frame. “Not even close,” he says.

“Hm,” Rick says with a little shrug. “Maybe you should.”

“Sure. When I decide I don’t wanna live anymore and would rather be crushed to death, I’ll get right on that.”

Rick laughs, reaches out and claps Daryl on the shoulder like they’re already friends. Daryl tries his hardest not to lean into his touch. “Listen man, I wanna make this project as painless as possible, so lemme give you my number, and we’ll set up a time to meet and start working on it.” Of all the times Daryl has imagined getting Rick’s number, none of them were so easy as this. He takes out his phone, fumbles and nearly drops it (football, yeah right), and opens up a new contact screen, punching in numbers while Rick rattles them off.

“I love poetry,” Daryl blurts out when Rick is finished. _Stop fucking talking, Dixon_ , he tells himself, but his mouth keeps going anyway. “Neruda is my favourite, so I, um. Know a lot about this kinda stuff. We’ll be fine.”

“Oh,” Rick says, and his face and tone are both so impassive that Daryl can’t get a read on exactly how much of a loser Rick thinks he is. “Well, that’s cool. Least we got one smart person, right?” He grins, and Daryl wants to tell him that he’s sure he’s smart, too, that it’s not like he’s an idiot, but Rick is already reaching back over the seats to grab his backpack and telling Daryl he has to go.

“Text me,” Rick says, as if Daryl isn’t already composing ten different versions of his first text to Rick in his mind so that he’s _prepared_.

“Yeah, great,” Daryl says, but Rick is out the door and his voice falters. Daryl stands looking after him for a long minute before he shakes his head and walks out too, half dazed. Even though it seems impossible, he’s got to find a way to get Rick out of his head, because he’s pretty sure there ain’t a damn bit of good that can come from any of this.

Later, when Daryl is back in his dorm and actually has a moment to read over the project paper, he _knows_ without doubt that no good will come of this. Not only do he and Rick have to agree on a poet to talk to their class about, they both then have to write a poem in the same vein as their chosen poet and read _each other’s_ to the class.

 _Fuck_ , Daryl thinks. Never in the history of people being screwed has anyone been screwed like he is right now. And not even in the fun way. Daryl collapses backward onto his bed, shielding his eyes from the sun coming in the window with his arm, breathing out a heavy sigh. They have three weeks to work on this project, and they’re going to be the longest of his life. Hell, every second spent with Rick where Daryl isn’t allowed to touch or even _want_ him is going to feel like a year.


	2. Chapter 2

_Text me_ , Rick had said, and yet somehow, Daryl is swiping his thumb across the screen of his phone to answer Rick’s call barely a day after their last class.

“Hey,” he says, trying for casual and then immediately regretting the way it sounds like he’s already so familiar with Rick when he hardly even knows him. “Um, what’s up?”

Rick’s voice even sounds good through the tiny speakers of his phone. “I got a good look at that paper for the project and I think we should start on this ASAP, man. I mean, we gotta research a poet and then write our own poem? I’ve never written a poem before in my entire life.”

Daryl tries to imagine how anyone could have reached the age of twenty and not written at least a haiku, but then again, it’s Rick. Frat boy extraordinaire who’s probably always been like this. Daryl tries to hate him for it because that would be easier, but he can’t because it’s kind of endearing in a really weird way. He gets to teach Rick about poetry, his favourite thing in the world (aside from motorcycles, maybe). He hopes he can convince him to work on Neruda. If Rick is never going to read him love poetry, then at the very least, he can write one for some girl somewhere who Daryl will be jealous of for the rest of his damn life.

Daryl is nodding before he realises Rick can’t see him. “Right, yeah, sounds good,” Daryl says, smacking himself in the forehead. “When d’you wanna…”

“I got time after like, four o’clock today so we can at least start discussing it. You wanna come by the frat house?”

Daryl feels a sudden sense of revulsion at the idea of going over there and being amongst Rick’s frat brothers. They probably won’t look at him twice, but Daryl’s had enough of being the butt of people’s jokes his whole fucking life, and he’s not going to give them the opportunity to prove him wrong.

“Uh,” Daryl says quietly. “Maybe we can do it here? In my dorm? It’ll probably be quieter.”

“Oh, yeah,” Rick says. “Didn’t think about that, these guys get rowdy sometimes. Sure, I’ll come by your dorm.”

Daryl gives him his hall and room number before they hang up. The time on his phone says 2:30. Rick had said after four, which isn’t an exact time, but Daryl’s not taking chances on that either. He scrambles to gather his things so he can take a shower; the last thing he wants is to smell bad or look bad (as if Rick will care) or do anything that will widen the already gaping sense of never-gonna-happen between himself and Rick.

#

When Daryl opens the door to Rick’s knocking at 4:30 on the nose, his hands are shaking a little bit. He steps aside to let Rick in, closes the door and turns to watch him glancing around at the walls. “Single room as a sophomore? You got lucky,” Rick says, and Daryl nods.

“Yeah, can’t complain,” he replies. He _is_ glad for it, since he doesn’t have a roommate anymore to watch the way he stares at the ceiling and thinks about Rick half the goddamn day. It’s embarrassing, but if he could stop, he would have by now. Daryl and Rick together is, as they say, a pipe dream, but Daryl is inhaling from that pipe so hard he’s got smoke coming out his ears.

“You like motorcycles,” Rick says, gesturing to the posters of bikes on his walls, and Daryl suddenly wonders if it’s suspect that he has no pictures of half-naked women up there, too. It’s not exactly like he’s hiding the fact that he’s gay as two men fucking on a rainbow, but he’s not sure he should outright advertise it to Rick until he knows he’s not going to freak out about it. He doesn’t really think that Rick’s that type of person just because he’s a frat boy, but Daryl’s experiences haven’t exactly led him to have instant faith in anybody yet. Not even Rick.

“Yeah, I ride ‘em,” Daryl says, gesturing out the window that faces the parking lot behind his residence hall. “That Triumph out there is mine.”

“That’s _awesome_ ,” Rick says, more enthusiastically than Daryl expects, going to the window to take a look. “I’ve never been on one, but I’ve always wanted to.” His tone is one of longing.

Daryl shrugs. “Maybe I’ll take you out on it sometime. If you want.” There’s no ulterior motive there like having Rick’s arms around his waist. Nope. None at all.

Rick grins at him. “That’d be cool.” And without even asking, as if he’s been here before and they’ve established a real rapport already, Rick plops onto the end of Daryl’s bed, kicks off his shoes, and curls his legs up. “So. Ready to work?”

“Oh, yeah,” Daryl says, and moves to the bed, sits up by his pillows so there’s a good two feet of space between himself and Rick. Any closer and he’s afraid Rick will _feel_ the goddamn desire coming off him in waves, like a rising tide. “Not sure what your thoughts are, but I thought maybe we could focus on Pablo Neruda? The guy we been talkin’ about in class.”

“Yeah, that’s cool. The Love Guy,” Rick says, not really to clarify but like it’s a proper epithet he’s given the Chilean poet.

“The love guy,” Daryl confirms with a half smile, easing up a little now that they’re talking a bit more comfortably. “You can write a love poem, can’tcha Rick?”

“Yeah, sure. Roses are red, violets are blue,” Rick says, and Daryl laughs.

“Okay, well, s’gonna have to be a bit more extensive than _that_ , but good start. And, y’know, it doesn’t have to be happy. Neruda wrote some pretty sad stuff, too.”

“Really?” Rick asks. “From what I’ve read, doesn’t sound like the guy knew how to be anything but… _fire_ ,” Rick concludes, and Daryl’s heart leaps at that assessment because it’s fairly true and more than he expected from Rick, who thinks poetry is dumb.

Daryl leans over to his desk from the bed and runs his finger along the spines of poetry books lined up between bookends. He finds the one he’s looking for, and flips through it until he reaches Neruda’s _Song of Despair_.

He swallows hard, and selects a line halfway through, begins to read to Rick. “‘ _How terrible and brief was my desire of you, how difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid. Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs, still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds. Oh, the bitten mouth, oh, the kissed limbs, oh, the hungering teeth, oh, the entwined bodies. Oh, the mad coupling of hope and force in which we merged and despaired_.’”

When he looks up, he blushes to find he has Rick’s rapt attention, and shuts the book with a hard snap, setting it back on the desk. “So, yeah, like that,” he says a little awkwardly.

“How do you do that?” Rick asks.

“Do what?”

“When I read it, I’m bored,” Rick replies with a smile. “When you read it…” He pauses, looking for the right words, eventually settling on, “I’m interested.”

Daryl tries not to read too much into that, tries not to take it too much to heart, but it’s too late. Just like that, Rick’s words are nearly a mantra. Interested, interested, interested. _He’s not interested in you, stupid, just the poetry_ , Daryl reminds himself. _Take the win and stop making it about you_.

But he smiles back, a smile that's probably way too big for his own face. “It’s just a matter of how you look at the words,” he says. “You gotta feel ‘em. There’s life in ‘em. You gotta put as much into the poem as you would into breathing if you just ran a mile. Just have to find the right rhythm to read it in and then it sounds like it’s s’posed to.”

Daryl half-bites his tongue to shut himself up before he keeps talking for an hour and bores Rick straight to death.

But Rick still looks interested despite Daryl’s babbling. “That’s cool, man. Maybe you can teach me more about it so my poem doesn’t come off like a toddler wrote it.”

Daryl chuckles and nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I can do that.”

#

Rick stays until it’s nearly six, a good hour after Daryl expects him to tire of his company and want to leave. They don’t talk poetry the whole time; instead, Rick talks about himself. Not in a egotistical way, but in a trading-of-information kind of way. And even if Daryl doesn’t have a lot to offer back (he mostly talks about his dumb older brother), it’s still a nice conversation, and Daryl learns a bit more about the guy he’s been into for more than a year now.

Rick’s a criminal justice major, for instance, something Daryl didn’t know, and he _loves_ it. He loves it as much as Daryl loves poetry and literature, and as much as Daryl can talk about those things, Rick can talk about the science of criminology and how he doesn’t agree with the death penalty and why community policing is so important. And Daryl starts to figure out that he’s made too many assumptions. As much as Rick jokes about not being smart, he’s got a head full of things that will probably someday change the justice system for the better. He’s certainly not the ultra frat boy partier that Daryl thought he was. ...Okay, so he’s a little bit that, too, but it’s nice to know that’s not all there is.

Rick leaves having added Daryl as a Facebook friend, and with a promise to get together again later that week so they can keep working on their project.

“Sooner we get it done, the better, right?” he says, and Daryl nods, agrees with him, though privately thinking that he’d make it last all semester if it meant spending more time with Rick.

When Rick is gone, Daryl grabs the poetry book off his desk and sinks back onto the bed, flipping through until he comes to _In My Sky At Twilight_ , reading to himself.

_You are mine, mine -- I go shouting it to the afternoon’s wind_.

Only, Rick isn’t his. Will never be. And eventually, he’ll have to give up this damn foolish dream.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... the RWG twisted my arm and made me post chapter three a few days early. By which I mean I barely needed convincing at all. By which I mean I suggested it and everybody agreed, so... here it is. Also, any of the poetry written by Rick or Daryl in this chapter and following chapters was written by me, and probably badly. I haven't written poetry in a zillion years, so it might be terrible. A+ for effort, right? :D

Fortuitous. That’s what Daryl will call it if Rick happens to notice that they’re in the same place at the same time. It’s not like Daryl’s stalking him or anything -- just that he happened to notice Rick ducking inside the café next to the building where Daryl has his next class, and Daryl likes to take any opportunity to spend a little more time staring at him. …Okay, so it’s weird and Daryl is weird and Daryl feels bad that he’s turning into such a freak over Rick, but if the whole world could see this boy, they’d all be tripping over themselves for an extra thirty seconds of looking at him, too.

Daryl gets in line a few places behind Rick, glancing over the drinks menu and trying to decide what he wants. He doesn’t even drink coffee, which probably makes it even worse that he decided this is the place to have an out-of-class, off-project encounter with Rick. Mentally kicking himself, he settles on a strawberry smoothie from the cafe’s tiny menu of non-coffee drinks, when he hears that perfect voice saying his name.

“Daryl? Hey!”

Daryl’s eyes immediately jump to Rick who’s turned around in the line, leaning to look past the people in between them. “Oh, hey,” Daryl says, and even _he’s_ not convinced by the faux fancy-meeting-you-here tone he’s trying to put on.

But then it’s Rick’s turn, so he holds up a finger and turns to order a drink, coming to join Daryl in line after paying. “You headed to class?” Rick asks, and Daryl nods.

“Yeah, you?”

“Yeah, next door. Corrections class,” he says, and the pause after makes it clear that Daryl is supposed to mention what class he’s going to.

“Oh, um. Gender and Sexuality for me.”

“Cool,” Rick says, “my friend’s in that class. Michonne, you know her?”

“Oh, yeah, I like Michonne, talked to her a few times. She’s great.”

“I know,” Rick says, giving an overdramatic sigh. “Been trying to get her to go out with me since we were kids. Every time I ask, she says, ‘Still gay, Rick.’”

Daryl laughs, shaking his head. “Think it’s probably time to give up on her.” And then something possesses Daryl, and he blurts out, “I get along with her pretty well. She gets me. I’m gay, too.”

“Oh?” Rick says. “Awesome.” Daryl isn’t sure Rick knows any descriptive words aside from ‘cool’ or ‘awesome,’ but he doesn’t seem weirded out, so Daryl calls it another win for him despite the fact that he just said what he was _sure_ he wouldn’t, at least not for a while. Or ever. The barista calls Rick’s name then, and he goes to the counter to grab his coffee before returning to Daryl’s side. “Hey, listen, I gotta get to class, but I’ll text you later so we can get together and work on the project. That good with you?”

“Yeah, definitely,” Daryl says, and Rick gives his shoulder a friendly nudge on his way out. When Daryl finally gets up to the counter and orders his drink, he starts to get his wallet out to pay before the barista holds up a hand.

“Your friend paid for your drink.”

“Huh?” Daryl says, and she just nods.

“Yeah. He paid for his and asked me to charge his card for whatever you were getting, too.”

Daryl just blinks and mutters, “Oh, okay,” a little dazedly before stepping aside to wait for his smoothie. Rick paid for his drink? Daryl tries not to let his heart fucking swell to ten times its normal size, but he thinks if Rick’s gonna keep pulling this kind of shit, he’s beyond help now.

#

When Rick texts him after class to ask him to meet him at the library later, Daryl adds a quick ‘thanks for the drink’ to his response. Rick replies ‘any time,’ which Daryl does his best to not make a thing, but of course it’s a thing.

When he does find him in the library that night, he’s surrounded by a pile of poetry books, apparently doing research, and it’s one of the most attractive things Daryl’s ever seen in his life. Daryl drops into the chair opposite Rick. “If you decide you like any of these, I basically have them all in my room if you just wanna borrow my copies. Save you from having to worry about remembering to return books and all.”

“Life-saver,” Rick sighs, and pushes one of the books toward Daryl, open to one of Neruda’s sonnets. “You know, if this guy was not getting laid twice _daily_ , there is no hope for the rest of us.”

Daryl laughs, skimming the lines of the poem. _I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair. Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps…_

Daryl glances up at Rick, examines the fullness of his lips, the random curls that are growing out and escaping the careful way Rick has combed them away from his face. _Crave your mouth, your voice, your hair… starving…_

“I agree,” Daryl says, voice coming out a pale imitation of itself. He clears his throat and hands the book back. “Anybody would be lucky to have a poem written for them like these.” He lets out a quiet sigh, trying to take the obnoxiously needy tone out of his voice.

Rick meets his eyes, then raises an eyebrow at him. Smirking, he closes the book. “Alright, who is it?”

“What?”

“Who are you in love with? You get that look on your face when you read his poetry, like you’re imagining it was written for you. You just said you wish it was. So who is it you’re all moony for?”

Daryl tries not to choke on his tongue. Of _course_. Pretty much every time they’ve been together, they’ve either been discussing or reading Neruda’s poems. And Rick thinks the dumb, dopey look Daryl gets on his face is because he wants what Neruda writes about, not mostly because he wants _Rick_. His cheeks go pink. “Nobody,” he says, quietly. “I mean… yeah, I wish stuff like this was written for me. But m’not… not in love with anyone.”

Daryl can feel the weight of the lie on his tongue, because no matter how much he wants it to be true, no matter how much he wants to tell himself this is still just a crush… it’s not. The more time he spends with Rick, the more he wants him. The more he falls for him. One look at Rick’s face says he’s not buying it either, but he shakes his head and says no more about it.

“So I have the first line of a poem down,” Rick says. “I thought maybe you could tell me if it’s good or not.”

“Oh, well, I’m no judge --”

“‘Course you are,” Rick answers. “You know what’s good and what’s not or you wouldn’t dig this stuff so much. And at this rate it’ll take me the whole time we got left to write the damn thing, so it’d help to have your critique.”

Daryl smiles, ducking his head a little. “Yeah, okay. Let’s have it.”

Rick digs a notebook out of his backpack, flips it open to a page with a single line on it, and passes it across the table to Daryl.

_Find me in a thunderstorm_

Daryl stares at it for a moment, turning the words over in his mind. Nothing about it speaks particularly of love, but at the same time, everything about this one line is romantic. _Find me at my worst_ , is what it says to him, and part of him is immediately sure the next line, whenever Rick writes it, will be about comfort.

“I like it,” Daryl tells him.

“You don’t have to lie,” Rick replies with a small smile as Daryl pushes his notebook back toward him.

“I’m not,” Daryl says. “I swear. It’s a powerful line to begin with. Like it a lot.”

Rick looks slightly crestfallen. “Oh great,” he mutters. “Now I got a lot to live up to.”

Daryl cracks up laughing, catching a narrowed eye from the librarian on duty a few feet away. “Whatever made you come up with this line… keep doin’ it,” he says. “It’ll all come. M’sure it’ll be amazing.”

Rick shakes his head. “Whatever I do, yours will be ten times better.”

Daryl shrugs. “Probably.”

Rick’s mouth drops open as if he hadn’t expected Daryl to joke with him like that, and Daryl doesn’t think he expected it from himself either. But he’s more comfortable around Rick now. His feelings grow exponentially by the minute at this point, but at least he knows he’s not going to leap across the table and kiss him now when they’re alone together.

“Smartass,” Rick says, no heat behind it. “Alright, Mr Poetry Guru, what you got?”

“Haven’t started yet.”

Rick fakes a gasp. “I’m ahead of the smartest kid in class?” He places a hand over his heart. “God, Dixon, I need a minute. Not sure how to handle this.”

Daryl shows him a choice finger and they both crack up again, and Daryl bites his lip on his laughter when the librarian gives them both an evil look.

When Rick regains his composure, he leans in. “Hey, listen, Delta’s got a party comin’ up at the house next weekend and I know it’s not really your thing, but I thought you might wanna come seein’ as how we’re friends and all now. If it makes you more comfortable, Michonne’s coming by, too, so I’m not the only person you’ll know.”

“Michonne, at a frat party?” Daryl says incredulously. “She’s never seemed the type.”

“She’s coming ‘cause she loves me,” Rick says. “Well, she’s letting me think that, anyway. Pretty sure she’s really coming so she can try to get with this girl Andrea she’s had a thing for. Or at least stare at her all night, ‘cause I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”

Daryl resolves right then to go, because at least he won’t be the only one going solely to spend more time with the person of their damn dreams. And if Michonne’s known Rick since they were kids, maybe he can squeeze some more information outta her about Rick.

“Yeah, okay,” Daryl agrees. “I’ll come.”

“Awesome,” Rick says. “You’ll have fun.”

Daryl highly doubts that, but he’s not gonna argue. Especially not when he’s sure he’s morphing into a teenage girl, because he’s already thinking about how he’s got a week to decide what to wear.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think I've given up pretending I have a real schedule for posting this anymore. I'm literally posting chapter four because I'm bored and I felt like it. 
> 
> One important personal note, though: opinions about criminal justice topics as expressed in this chapter (and others) by Rick are not just my own words, but my own thoughts both as a student of criminal justice and as a compassionate person. Glenn Ford was a real person who passed away this year and whose death I feel genuine, deep sadness for. His life was ruined, far too much insult was added to injury, and he died having barely tasted the freedom he so deserved. I express my anger on behalf of this man and on behalf of others like him through some of Rick’s statements not to make this fic a political statement, but because I think even canon Rick has a mind and heart that would not have watched injustices like these play out without feeling angry about them.

They spend all the time they have together throughout the rest of the week in the library or Daryl’s room, getting together what they’re going to say about Neruda and his poetry so they can just focus on crafting their own poems. Daryl still hasn’t started, because a good part of him is sure that once he does, everything he feels for Rick will come pouring out and it will be obvious to Rick that it’s about him.

So he procrastinates on that portion of the project, just worries about Neruda and making sure Rick is on the right track with his own poem while balancing his other classes and making sure a stupid little thing like being in goddamn love isn’t driving his other grades down. He almost wishes it were so he’d have a valid excuse to spend less time with Rick, because all he’s doing is giving himself false hope. He needs to learn to be okay with just being Rick’s friend. _Yeah, that’ll happen_.

“How do they make it look so easy?” Rick grouses, erasing a word from his poem for the eighth time now, having replaced it each time with one he was sure was the right one, apparently only to find that it definitely wasn’t.

“Hmm?” Daryl says, looking up from his book. He swallows a sigh at the sight of Rick, leaned up against the wall with one of Daryl’s pillows behind his back, knees drawn up with his notebook resting on them.

“Every poet I’ve read now has made it seem like the words just come together so easily but they don’t. Nothing seems right. I just put the same word I already had twice back in again.”

“Can I see?” Daryl asks, holding out a hand hopefully. Rick hasn’t let him look again yet past that first line, and he looks hesitant now, but he seems to recognise he’s not getting anywhere alone, so he hands his notebook over to Daryl where there are now four complete lines of poetry.

 _Find me in a thunderstorm_  
_Persuade me to keep my head down_  
_I have been waiting on a lightning strike_  
_But you would hardly want the rain for me_

The words make Daryl’s breath catch in the back of his throat. 'Rain’ is clearly the one that’s been erased and rewritten multiple times, but Rick needn’t have bothered looking for another, because in Daryl’s opinion, it fits the theme and the meaning.

“Rick, this is beautiful. Leave this the way it is. Seriously. It’s workin’, trust me.”

“Really?” Rick says, accepting the notebook back from Daryl.

“Really.”

“And you… you get meaning out of it?” Rick asks, hesitant again.

“Yeah. I know what you’re tryin’ to say,” Daryl says. “Can I ask who it’s about?”

Rick shrugs. “I dunno really,” he says. “Nobody, I guess. Just a poem.” And just like when Daryl lied to him in the library a few days ago, Rick is lying now. He can tell, because nobody puts that much meaning into a poem that isn’t about anybody. But Daryl doesn’t call him on it, partly because it’s not _really_ his business, and partly because he doesn’t really wanna know that badly. It’ll only make him feel worse, even though it’s not like he’s blind to the fact that wherever Rick’s affections lie, it’s not with him.

“Well,” Daryl says, “it’s a good one. You know what you’re doing.”

Rick snorts. “Learned it all from you, man. And reading all these books.” He reaches for one near where Daryl’s hand is resting, and their knuckles brush together. It takes a moment for Daryl to realise it, by which point it looks like he’s purposely keeping his hand against Rick’s, and pulls it back awkwardly, not looking at Rick, apologising belatedly. Rick, to his credit, says nothing, pushes off Daryl’s embarrassment like it didn’t happen even though it was kinda Rick’s fault. Meanwhile Daryl berates his subconscious self for clearly _wanting_ it to happen.

Rick picks up the book and flips through it a little aimlessly, until he comes across one poem he seems to like. He dog-ears the page, and even though Daryl wouldn’t let that slide with anyone else, he doesn’t mind so much that Rick does it. The fact that Rick is this interested now, enough that he wants to make note of specific Neruda poems makes Daryl feel warm. Not just because he’s stupidly head-over-heels for Rick, but also because he feels like he gave a gift to someone. Poetry can do incredible things, and he thinks Rick is starting to see that.

And because he wants to get something back, something he knows Rick can and will give him, he says quietly, “Tell me about that man who died of cancer a few months ago. The one who was on death row. Teach me somethin’.”

Rick’s eyebrows raise for a second, as if he hadn’t ever expected this question out of Daryl. But then they turn down, and Rick’s face is all frown, all scowl. “Guess you saw that in the news? His name was Glenn Ford and he was on death row for thirty years,” Rick says. “For something he didn’t do. They thought he robbed and killed someone just ‘cause he got in some trouble for theft before. He was a Black man, too, that didn’t do him any favours. His attorneys hadn’t ever practised criminal law. And that asshole prosecutor, he admits what he did was wrong now, but it was fucked up, Daryl. It took them three hours to find him guilty with no evidence and then they just ripped thirty years of his life away.”

Rick’s tone is passionate, anguished, and it’s clear to Daryl that he feels real pain for this man, the way Daryl gets pain or happiness or ecstasy out of poetry.

Daryl whispers a soft ‘wow,’ as if that could do it justice. “That’s not the worst of it though,” Rick continues. “When they finally got their damn heads on straight and released him, he was dying of cancer they didn’t bother to treat because he was on death row. Gonna die anyway, right?” Rick shakes his head. “They gave him a $25 dollar gift card when he got out. No compensation, no health care… just what your fuckin’ grandma would give you for Christmas.” Rick thumps the Neruda book back into the pile on Daryl’s bed and sighs.

“And now he’s dead,” Daryl says softly. He hadn’t realised the extent of what the man he’d read about in the news had gone through. But Rick is angry about it like he knew him, like they were friends.

“Now he’s dead,” Rick says. “And it happens all the time. Way too much. Sorry, I get… amped up about this stuff. It makes me so mad, Daryl. I wanna be a cop but I don’t want it to be this way. What’s the point of justice if it isn’t actually justice? I want it to change.”

“You can change it,” Daryl says at once, not to placate Rick, but because he genuinely believes it. “You’re smart. You care. Ain’t a lot of people out there anymore who got both of those things, but you do.”

Rick smiles. “Thanks, man. That’s nice of you to say. I dunno if I have that much faith in me, but it’s nice someone does.”

Daryl smiles back. “Just don’t expect me to hang around the statue they build for you someday, hero-worshiping it or somethin’.”

Rick laughs and smacks Daryl in the knee. “I’ll be expectin’ you to polish it up nice and pretty like that motorcycle of yours.”

“In your dreams, Grimes.”

They share another laugh and then fall into a comfortable silence while Rick goes back to examining the four lines and mostly blank page that is the entirety of his poem thus far. After a few minutes of staring, he gives a slightly disgusted sigh and slides the notebook back into his bag. “I give up for tonight. You wanna go do something fun?” And before Daryl opens his mouth to answer, Rick adds. “Yeah, yeah, I know, poetry is _fun_. But I’m talking something a little different.”

Daryl raises his eyebrows, looking at Rick suspiciously. “What you got in mind?”

Rick grins, and jumps to his feet, shoving the rest of his things into his backpack and tugging his boots on. “Get somethin’ warmer on and meet me down by the Delta house in a half hour.”

He turns to go and Daryl calls after him. “Wait! I didn’t even agree to whatever this is --” Daryl begins, but Rick waves a hand.

“You will,” he says, devilish grin crossing that gorgeous face, and Daryl feels his insides turn to mush and he nods. Rick opens the door, and then turns back again. “Oh… and bring a flashlight.”

Before Daryl can ask anything else about why he could possibly need a flashlight, Rick is gone. Daryl shakes his head and gets up from the bed to get dressed properly. Rick is probably the last person on Earth he could say no to, and frankly, he doesn’t really want to. Whatever he has planned, Daryl is sure it’ll be worth it to go, if only just to hang out with him a little while longer.

#

“Okay, listen up!”

“We’re right here, Rick. It’s just the four of us. We can hear you.”

Rick frowns at Michonne. “Let me have my moment, okay?”

Michonne catches Daryl’s eye and smirks. On Daryl’s left, Rick and Michonne’s friend Maggie rolls her eyes so hard it’s almost audible.

“Get on with it, then,” Maggie says.

“So, this is gonna be a good classic game of hide ‘n’ seek. In the dark. One team hides, the other team seeks. The team hiding has fifteen minutes to hide anywhere on campus, _outside only_ , and then the seekers use whatever wits they got to track the hiders down.”

Maggie snorts. “Wits? You’ll never find anyone, Grimes, y’should give up now.”

Rick shows her his middle finger and then says, “Well, since this game was my _illustrious_ idea --”

“Christ, Daryl,” Michonne says, cringing. “Stop teaching the poor boy big words his mouth can barely fit around.”

Rick shows Michonne his other middle finger and Daryl cracks up laughing. “Daryl and I will be hiding first,” he finishes. He plucks Michonne’s phone out of her pocket and puts in her passcode. “Nice to know you still never change that. Annnnd, okay. We’re good. Fifteen minutes on the clock.” He hands it back, then reaches forward and presses start.

Then he looks at Daryl, and with a wide, wicked grin on his face, says, “ _Run_.”

They take off together and duck behind the nearest building, doubling back around the other side of the house where Michonne and Maggie aren’t watching, then sneak as quietly as possible behind the closest building across the street. They both stop for a moment to catch their breath.

“Where you wanna go?” Daryl asks, panting, and Rick grins.

“You tell me,” he says, and Daryl pauses to think for a moment.

“There’s a little alcove thing behind my dorm,” Daryl says. “Nobody really knows about it. They’ll be lookin’ forever.”

“Perfect, let’s go.” They start running together again, keeping to the grass as much as possible to muffle their footfalls, going as fast as they can back up toward Daryl’s res hall. When they get around the back, Daryl shows Rick the wooden fencing that houses the big dumpsters near the wall of the building, and the gap between it and the wall. 

Rick squeezes in first, and Daryl hesitates for only a moment before following him. They sit down together in the little space, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, thighs touching, and Daryl does his best not to die. He can smell Rick’s cologne being those close, unsure what it is but immediately cataloguing it in the back of his mind as the scent of _Rick_.

They take time to catch their breath now, and Rick clicks on his flashlight, illuminating his smiling face. “See? Told you this’d be fun.”

“Tons,” Daryl says, still half-breathless, but grinning like an idiot.

“I’m glad we’re friends,” Rick says quietly after a long moment of silence.

“Me too,” Daryl replies, and means it, because even if he wants to be more than friends, he knows friendship is all he gets, and it’s better than nothing.

“It sounds stupid, but... I have Maggie and Michonne, sure, but all my other friends are my frat brothers. You’re different.” Daryl frowns but Rick adds quickly, “In a good way. Really. You’re like… a grounding presence.”

Daryl swallows, praying Rick can’t see him blush in the beam of the flashlight. “Gettin’ all poetic now on me, Rick.” Rick chuckles, nudges his shoulder with his own. “You’re kinda my only friend,” Daryl tells him.

Rick turns his head to look at him and Daryl meets his eyes. “What?”

Daryl laughs a little self-deprecatingly. “I didn’t mean that to sound so pathetic. Just don’t got a lot of friends. I mean, I’m sorta friends with Michonne now and all, too, but it’s only been a week and you’re the first person outside of my brother I’ve hung out with this much since, oh… middle school, probably.”

Rick looks away and sighs. “Wow, man. I’m sorry.”

Daryl shrugs. “Don’t be. It’s okay,” he says, even though it isn’t. But it’s not Rick’s fault, so it doesn’t matter. “I only ever had my brother, y’know, and Merle’s a dick. He loves me but I don’t think he thinks much of me sometimes between the gay thing and the poetry.” Daryl gives a little chuckle to lighten the words, even though what he’s saying weighs heavy on him all the time. “But it’s nice hanging out and doin’ ridiculous shit like this and not staying cooped up in my room all the time for once.”

Rick fakes a gasp. “ _Ridiculous_? You take that back, Daryl Dixon. This is a time honoured tradition among my friends.”

Daryl laughs. “Uh huh. I bet.”

“It is,” Rick insists. “I usually play this with my house at least once a semester.”

“And you didn’t invite ‘em all to play tonight?”

Rick shakes his head. “Nah. Just Michonne and Maggie. I knew they’d be game. Plus, I know frat activities aren’t exactly your thing, and you already agreed to come to the party next weekend. Figured I wouldn’t overwhelm you by shoving twenty wild frat boys down your throat right now.” Daryl snorts at Rick’s phrasing and watches him go red in the light from the flashlight. “Uh… that came out wrong.”

“Sounded alright to me,” Daryl says with a grin and Rick rolls his eyes.

“‘Course it did, perv.” There’s a pause, and Rick clicks out the flashlight quickly, whispering, “Shh, think they’re coming this way!”

“Has it even been fifteen minutes?” Daryl hisses back.

“No,” Rick mutters. “Those little cheaters.”

They grow quiet, and Daryl can hear footsteps running across the parking lot.

“Come out, come out wherever you are,” someone crows, and it’s Maggie, of course.

“We can smell wuss from a mile away, Grimes!” Michonne adds, and the girls laugh.

Daryl wants to call out that they can smell cheaters from a mile away, but seeing as how that would give away their hiding place, he clamps his mouth shut and bites his tongue, thinking that when it’s their turn to hide, he’ll show off his tracking and hunting skills and won’t even need to cheat to do it. He smiles to himself and revels in the feeling of friendship. It’s nice. It feels good. And someone like Merle would call him a pussy for feeling so alive right now just because of this, but Daryl doesn’t care.

It doesn’t take long for Michonne and Maggie to find them. Despite the fact that they’re being quieter than mice, it only takes the girls two minutes after they reach the parking lot to shine flashlights in their faces and start lauding their victory.

“You cheated!” Daryl says indignantly, wiggling out of their hiding spot and giving Rick his hand to help him up (belatedly realising that this is as close as he’ll get to ever holding Rick’s hand). “That was not fifteen minutes.”

Maggie shrugs and drapes an arm around Daryl’s shoulders. “Look at him, Michonne. He’s so cute. He thinks we follow rules!”

Daryl laughs despite himself and Maggie ruffles his hair.

“Alright, boys,” Michonne says. “Start your countdown. Good luck.”

And she and Maggie are off without another word.

“You’ll be lucky if you get five minutes!” Rick shouts after them, then turns to Daryl. “We’re gonna give ‘em the whole fifteen. False sense of security.”

Daryl nods. “I agree. Plus, I spent my whole damn life in the woods. I can sure as shit hunt a _person_.”

Rick’s face splits into a wide grin. “Knew having you on my team was a good idea.” Rick claps him on the shoulder and then his hand runs down Daryl’s arm just briefly before he pulls it away. Daryl tries his hardest not to shudder at the way it makes him feel.

 _Friends_ , he thinks. _We’re friends. That’s a good thing. Just be his friend_.

Daryl repeats this to himself for an entire fifteen minutes, smiling forcibly while Rick chatters away to him about things Daryl’s not even sure he’s hearing. And when the time comes to find Maggie and Michonne, Daryl takes the lead and lets Rick follow close behind him, if only so he can have a respite from looking at Rick and thinking things he just can’t help.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I've totally given up on having a real schedule for posting this now. :D I guess it's just whenever the mood takes me at this point. Happy holidays! (;
> 
> Oh, and, just to let you know, there's a bit of a time jump here (the space of about a week) to avoid boring the hell out of you all.

Daryl is doing his best to smooth out the wrinkles in his favourite shirt when he gets Rick’s text.

_**Party don’t start ‘til you walk in…** _it reads, and Daryl rolls his eyes._ _

_**Doubt it. But I’m on my way.**_ Daryl hits send and sighs. He’s sure it’ll be dark in the house anyway. It’s a party after all. Hopefully, no one will notice the state of his shirt. Daryl slides his phone into his pocket, grabs the student ID card that doubles as his building and room key, and takes one last cursory glance in the mirror. 

___Good as it gets_ , he tells himself, and heads out._ _

__It’s not hard to find the frat house. Even if Daryl didn’t walk past it on his way to the poetry class he shares with Rick, the bass heavy music and the smell of barbecued food coming from that general direction would be a beacon._ _

__When he arrives, the door is wide open and the last hints of pink are just fading from the sky. There are Christmas lights strung up along the walls and the banister leading up the stairs when Daryl enters, but it’s just as dark as he expected, so he feels less self-conscious about his clothing choice. He spots Michonne immediately in the living room, backed away from the people dancing, cup in her hand, eyes firmly fixed on a pretty blonde grinding between two guys._ _

__Daryl moves along the walls until he reaches Michonne. She gives him a wry smile when he sidles up next to her. “Welcome,” she says, raising her voice above the loud music. “Outsiders Club meets here.”_ _

__“Oh, c’mon,” he says, raising his voice, too, trying for outgoing. “We’re not outsiders, we’re just --” he pauses when he sees the look she’s giving him. “Not buyin’ it, huh?”_ _

__“Not even close.”_ _

__He sighs and shakes his head. “You seen Rick? I only came ‘cause he invited me.”_ _

__Michonne shakes her head, too, dreadlocks spreading across her shoulders like Medusa’s angry snakes. “Nope. Sure he’s around here somewhere. I only came ‘cause of her.” She nods at the blonde and Daryl grins._ _

__“She even gay?” he asks, and gets a shrug in return._ _

__“Everyone’s a little bi-curious sometimes, right?”_ _

__Daryl laughs. “Well, if anyone could make someone realise their bi-curiosity, I’m sure it’s you.”_ _

__Michonne smiles. “Thanks for the confidence.”_ _

__A moment later, Rick appears at Daryl’s shoulder like a ghost, and Daryl assumes he must have come from somewhere down the hallway behind him._ _

__“Hey,” Daryl says loudly, and god, it’s hard to try for casual when he has to shout to be heard._ _

__“Glad you both made it,” he says, flashing them a thumbs up. “Great party, right?”_ _

__Daryl can already smell booze on him, booze and cologne and god knows what else, and he fights the urge to put his face against Rick’s neck and inhale him._ _

__“Great party,” Daryl parrots._ _

__“Epic,” Michonne says, utterly deadpan._ _

__Daryl looks away, back toward the mass of dancing people, and wills himself not to blush. It’s dark enough that it’d surely be hard to see if he did, but knowing his luck, he’d glow like fucking Rudolph’s nose._ _

__“See someone you’re into, Daryl?” Rick asks and Daryl looks back at him, sees him wearing that knowing smirk. “Got that look on your face again. It’s a tell.”_ _

__Daryl shakes his head. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Rick.”_ _

__“Uh huh. Well, listen, I’m not sure if any of these guys swing your way but I’m sure you’ll find ‘em if they do. Have a little faith. I’ll get you a drink.”_ _

__Rick disappears and Michonne looks at him and snorts out a laugh. “How long?” She asks._ _

__“What?” Daryl says, catching her eye and hoping the floor will open up and pull him straight to hell. He feels like he’s already there._ _

__“How long you been all stupid over Rick?”_ _

__Daryl’s eyes go wide. “You can’t tell him, please --” he starts to beg, but she puts a hand on his shoulder._ _

__“Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me. He’ll catch on eventually though. Kid’s smarter than he looks.”_ _

__Daryl scrubs a hand across his face and groans._ _

__“Since last year,” he says, quiet enough that he can barely hear himself over the music. “Don’t gotta tell me I don’t have a chance.”_ _

__Michonne smiles a little, casting her gaze back toward Andrea. “I’ve known Rick all my life,” she says. “Dunno about him, but hey…everyone’s a little bi-curious, right?” And with that, she downs her drink, winks at Daryl, and starts squeezing into the crowd to get to Andrea. Daryl wishes he could be like her; it’s a brave woman who would let sleazy frat boys dance up on her just so she can get close to a girl when she doesn’t even know if that girl will have her._ _

__“The wild Michonne makes her move,” Rick narrates when he returns, handing Daryl a cup of something that looks like beer but smells like a strange combination of fruit and a gym locker. “I gotta track down some people, but I’ll be back. Try to have fun, Daryl. It’s a party.”_ _

____

#

It’s an hour and a half later, and Rick hasn’t come back. Daryl is still hanging on the outskirts of the dancing, but he’s got it in his mind to just leave. He’s not even a fan of birthday parties, let alone _frat_ parties, so maybe it was a mistake to come. _You don’t belong here_ , he tells himself, and starts sidestepping people who don’t give him a second glance in an effort to get to the front door. Rick can’t be disappointed that he at least made an appearance -- not that he can even find Rick. Even Michonne has disappeared.

He finally makes his way out onto the porch of the frat house, the music behind him still thumping in his head and chest, threatening to give him a headache. He sinks down onto the steps to try and get himself together, and so maybe he can pretend to be sociable for five more minutes before he leaves. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t hoping for Rick to wander by so he can at least say goodbye.

Daryl shakes his head, trying to clear it, and upends the remainder of his now piss-warm beer (if that’s what it is) into the bush next to the steps. The next moment, there’s a strangled cry from the bush, and Daryl jumps to his feet as the thing shakes and a figure comes crashing out of it, sputtering and dripping Daryl’s dumped drink all over his face and shirt. As Daryl’s luck would have it, of course it’s Rick. He frowns at Daryl and stumbles toward the steps, and Daryl wonders if he’s about to get yelled at, but Rick just sinks down onto the steps face first, narrowly missing knocking Daryl over, and laughing like an idiot.

“Throw a lotta things at me, Dixon,” Rick says, or slurs, and Daryl leans down to take his hand, hoist him up off the steps and to his feet.

“Stop takin’ naps in weird places,” Daryl replies with an awkward laugh.

“Wasn’t napping,” Rick says, in the middle of a yawn. “Just resting my eyes. So tired, Daryl.”

“Okay,” Daryl says, and after years of experience dealing with the various drunk members of his household, Daryl can totally handle drunk Rick. At the very least, he seems to be a pleasant drunk rather than an angry one. “Let’s get you to bed. No more booze for you tonight.”

He drapes Rick’s arm around his shoulders and heads back inside. Rick grips him tight, and they start taking the stairs one at a time, Rick laughing at nothing the whole way up. On the first landing, Daryl smacks into somebody coming down. Rick makes an emphatic ‘oomph’ noise, and looks up at the person they’ve run into.

“Shane!” Rick cries, and lets go of Daryl to embrace the frankly solid fucking brick wall of a guy that Shane is. Daryl changes his mind about Rick immediately. Rick is not the epitome of a frat boy. This Shane guy absolutely _is_. Every stereotype about frat boys seen in the movies is exactly what Shane looks like. Rick lets go after Shane pats him on the back.

“Ugh, get off me, brother. You’re _wet_. Nasty.”

“Daryl,” Rick says, “this is my best friend, Shane.” Daryl catches Rick as he starts to stumble backward and holds out a hand. Shane gives it a curt shake. “Shane, this is my Daryl.” Rick hiccups. “I mean, Daryl.”

Daryl absolutely does not take that to heart either, Rick calling him _**his**_. _Get it together, Dixon. Just keep it together_.

“Which one’s his room?” Daryl asks Shane, who is rolling his eyes at his absurdly drunk best friend.

“Top of the stairs, go right, end of the hall on the left.”

“Thanks,” Daryl says, and with a grunt, he heaves Rick’s arm back across his shoulders and starts helping him up the second flight of stairs. When they get to the top, Rick starts to try to go left, but Daryl angles him the other way. “C’mon,” he says. “Almost there.”

He practically drags Rick the rest of the way down the hall toward his room, nudging the door open all the way with his foot and walking Rick inside. Daryl immediately deposits Rick onto his bed and does him the favour of untying his boots and tugging them off before pushing his legs under the blankets and pulling them up over him. He’d try to get the wet, sticky shirt off of him, but he thinks that would be going a step too far.

“Get some sleep,” Daryl says quietly, no longer having to shout, and turns to leave. But Rick catches his wrist in his fingertips before he gets two steps from the bed.

“Daryl,” he slurs over a loud yawn, voice heavy with the alcohol. “It’s me, isn’t it?”

“What?” Daryl says, turning to look at Rick, who’s staring up at him, eyes shining in the light from the window.

“It’s me you’re in love with.”

Daryl’s heart leaps into his throat. “I don’t --” he starts, but Rick is shaking his head, letting go of Daryl.

“S’okay. I don’t mind...”

And then he passes out, leaving Daryl standing there like an idiot, room spinning around him like it’s him that’s drunk, cold fear creeping up his spine.

#

Daryl shuts the door hard when he gets back to his dorm. He strips down to his boxers before collapsing on the bed, mind a whirling mess of thoughts and feelings, and god _damn it_ , Rick, why did you have to say _that_?

Daryl is torn, unsure whether he wants Rick to know or not, but of course, it’s too late for that now. He already does, and Daryl didn’t even have to confirm it for him. Michonne had said he’d figure it out, but Daryl thought he’d at least have time to work up a logical response for whenever he did. Instead, he’d already worked it out and now Daryl feels ten times worse.

_In here_ , last week, Daryl tells himself. _When your hands brushed and you held it there too long. Or when he met you in the library and you told him his shirt looked nice. Or when you looked too long like you always do. Stupid, stupid, stupid_ …

He can still feel his wrist damn near burning with Rick’s touch.

_It’s me, isn’t it?_

Daryl’s chest tightens, and before he knows what he’s doing, he’s got a hand inside his boxers, his cock is already hard as hell, and he’s stroking quickly, a hundred thoughts of Rick spinning through his mind at top speed.

_It’s me you’re in love with._

“ _Yes_ ,” Daryl hisses, eyes closed, an image of Rick beneath him etched in his mind. He comes so fast and hard that he barely has time to realise it’s happening. The orgasm takes him completely by surprise, leaves him arching his back and moaning out Rick’s name to an empty room, silent but for his own heavy, desperate breathing. He lies there a long time after the high has worn off, after his heart has stopped racing, just thinking about how completely and utterly screwed he is because Rick knows. He _knows_.


	6. Chapter 6

Daryl wakes up to the text alert on his phone the next morning at 9, and since it’s a Saturday, he considers that an outright crime. But he knows who it is before he even looks at his phone. He only ever rarely gets texts from Merle, so he’s positive that it’s Rick. He keeps his eyes shut and wills his phone to stop chirping at him. He hasn’t even begun to consider how he’s going to deal with the fallout of last night, and 9 o’clock in the goddamn morning is certainly not the time to be doing so.

But his phone keeps going off, so he rolls over, snags it off the charger, and keys in his passcode. He blinks at the blurry notifications, rubs his eyes, and lets the name come into focus. _Rick_. Sighing heavily, he opens the messages.

_**You awake?** _

Two minutes later: _**Wake up!**_

Another minute after that: _**Daryl Dixon. Wake up.**_

And three minutes after that, just now: _**Meet me in the back of your hall in a half hour or I breach. Bring a jacket.**_

Daryl rolls his eyes at the phone. Breach? Rick is a little early on the cop talk for someone still in college. Still, he taps the screen to answer the message.

_**Better be a good reason for this, Grimes.** _

Daryl slides out of bed and heads for the shower. He doesn’t care if he’s more than a half hour; he’s not facing Rick looking like he laid awake until four mulling over the fact that Rick told him he knows Daryl is in love with him, even though that’s exactly what he did. He’s not going down there looking like death warmed over to meet with the guy who now knows how Daryl feels. It doesn’t matter to him if Rick doesn’t feel the same about him, Daryl is still going to try to look his best.

He scrubs up quickly and combs his hair, and then spends an extra five minutes in front of the mirror, wondering what to say to Rick. Wondering how he can get his mouth to form the words, _Give me time, I’ll get over you_. Not least because he’s not fucking sure that he will.

Sighing in resignation to his plight, he collects his ID and his phone and slides his favourite leather jacket on. He takes the nearest stairs to the back doors and pushes them open to find Rick standing there in his letterman jacket because of course he is, leaning against the hood of a dark SUV, because of course that’s what he’d drive. It’s halfway between frat boy paradise and the cool cop Rick wants to be.

“Get in,” Rick says, by way of greeting.

“Uh,” Daryl says, raising an eyebrow. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see when we get there. C’mon.”

Daryl steps closer, gets a better look at Rick. He probably shouldn’t have worried about what he looks like, because Rick actually _does_ look like death warmed over. He’s clearly hungover and tired, but with a look in his eyes like he’s set on whatever his plan is, so Daryl gives in and gets in the car.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” Daryl asks when Rick is settled behind the wheel.

“Sure,” Rick says with a grin. “I’m hungover, but I’m fine.” He buckles his seatbelt, starts the car and drives out of the parking lot, headed toward god only knows where. “Actually, that’s what this whole thing is about. Making it up to you.”

“Making what up to me?” Daryl says, starting to feel even more nervous because he’s sure this is going to be The Conversation.

“Well, I was kind of a giant asshole,” Rick says. “I invited you to a party and then I abandoned you and got drunk and you had to put me to bed. So I hear.”

Daryl turns his head so fast he nearly gets whiplash. “You… um, you don’t remember that?”

Rick shakes his head. “No. Shane filled me in when I managed to get downstairs to get water this morning. He says he met you while you were dragging my wasted ass up the stairs.”

“Oh,” Daryl says, mouth going dry. “Yeah. He seems, uh. Nice. Though he probably coulda lifted you with one finger and gotten you there quicker.”

Rick snorts out a laugh. “Yeah, well, Shane doesn’t do much unless there’s something in it for him. I woke up covered in booze so of course he wouldn’t have wanted to get it on him. Anyway, I wanna say I’m real sorry about that, Daryl. It was a dick move.”

Daryl’s heart is warring in his chest, one half elated that Rick doesn’t remember what he said, the other half sinking lower and lower until it feels like it’s resting somewhere in the middle of his stomach. _That_ half is hurt that Rick doesn’t remember, that he drank enough to completely blank out the fact that Daryl is in-fucking-love with him. But there’s nothing to be done about it now, because Daryl certainly isn’t going to remind him. It’s probably better for both of them in the end if Rick’s forgotten.

“It’s okay,” Daryl says, softly. “Wasn’t any trouble.”

“Sure it was,” Rick answers. “That’s why I’m taking you somewhere today. I’m taking you to see my favourite place. So you can see I’m not just a stupid drunk frat boy.”

“Rick,” Daryl says, and there’s a little lump at the back of his throat that he tries to swallow down and ignore. “That’s… I know that’s not what you are.”

Rick gives him a sheepish grin and shakes his head. “Well, I _am_ , but I’m not just that. Not usually, anyway. Besides, I brought food. You can’t say no to food.”

After about a mile, Rick takes an exit onto the highway.

“Where the hell are we even going?” Daryl asks.

Rick looks at him and winks. “Told ya. You’ll see when we get there.”

#

_There_ turns out to be Sweetwater Creek State Park. Daryl has only been there once, when he was a small child, and it sticks in his mind no more than any other stretch of nature after all the woods he’s been in. But this time, he thinks, he’ll remember. He’ll remember it because he’s with Rick, and there’s something about Rick and the trees and a cloudless blue sky that makes a difference. Rick parks and ushers Daryl out of the car, grabbing a backpack and from the backseat and slinging it over his shoulders before locking up and leading Daryl toward a marked hiking trail. Rick walks with purpose, seems to know exactly where he’s going, so Daryl follows his lead.

“You ever hiked before?” Rick asks. “I know you said you hunted.”

“Yeah. I mean, hunting can involve a fair amount of hiking depending on where you are,” Daryl replies.

“Have you always hunted?”

Daryl nods. “Yeah, since I was a kid. My dad…” Daryl pauses. The word _dad_ feels funny in his mouth. “My father, he used to take me and Merle out, wouldn’t let us go back until we shot or caught somethin’. So I learned pretty quick.”

“What, he would keep you out there in the woods ‘til you killed something?”

Daryl nods, shivers at the memory. It’s not a new memory, but sometimes it feels like it. It feels like his life away from home is wearing a coat over the old clothes of his past. They’re always there, always dirty and torn, right underneath the exterior he has forcibly created.

“No offence,” Rick says quietly as if the trees will hear them talking, “but he doesn’t seem like a very nice guy.”

“He wasn’t,” Daryl replies simply. Rick seems to gather that Daryl doesn’t want to go into further detail. Or really, it’s not that Daryl doesn’t _want_ to, but he isn’t sure if he can. He trusts Rick implicitly, but all the words he could say feel so heavy, and he doesn’t want to ruin this day. Not when Rick tried so hard to do something nice. So Rick changes the subject to poetry, and lets Daryl talk his ear off about Neruda until he interrupts after a while to point up ahead at a structure standing out through the trees.

“There,” Rick says. “It’s an old mill that the Confederates lost to the Union soldiers during the Civil War. They forced the Confederate troops out and torched it so now it’s just ruins. But it’s kind of amazing to see.”

“I was here once when I was a kid but I never saw this,” Daryl says as they approach, a little awestruck. They could be any ruins, but it’s less about them than it is about the way that, before the park was created around it, the wilds of Georgia took back its land and swallowed up the ruins with it. It’s clear that all the brush has long been cleared away so that the mill stands starkly amongst its surroundings, but nature, as always, is greener than envy and lush enough to be the real sight to see.

“The mill was supplying cloth to the Confederates and the Union wanted to cut off their supplies, so they destroyed it,” Rick tells him. “It’s kinda been forgotten now. Tourists come and go I think without knowing war happened here.”

Daryl smiles a half smile, and looks over at Rick. “You’re one of them Civil War nerds, huh?”

Rick laughs. “Nah. I mean, well, a little. But I don’t dress up and re-enact it or anything. Anyway, you should talk, Dixon. Neruda could rise from the grave and ask you to dinner and you’d shit yourself.”

Daryl laughs and nudges Rick with his shoulder. “Shut it, Grimes.”

Daryl tries not to let it feel like a date, but goddamn it, it does. It’s a warm day for early November, and Daryl turns his face toward the sun while Rick spreads a blanket from his backpack across the ground near the ruins of the mill, and pulls out wrapped sandwiches and a Ziploc bag of cookies.

“Chocolate chip?” Daryl asks hopefully, dropping down next to Rick on the blanket.

Rick nods. “Yeah, I made ‘em.”

Daryl has to laugh at how earnest Rick is being, as if he wouldn’t have accepted a straight-up apology. But he finds it endearing and sweet that Rick would go to such lengths to show him how sorry he is, and he’d been right about one thing: Daryl would never turn down food. So he takes the offered sandwich and a cookie from the bag in which Rick has carefully lined them up in neat rows, one atop the other, and settles in to eat. Rick sits across from him with a sandwich of his own and a cookie.

“You said this is your favourite place?” Daryl asks, taking a bite of his sandwich, and Rick nods.

“Yeah. I thought you might like it, too. ‘Cause it’s kinda like poetry.”

And Daryl doesn’t really have to ask, because he gets it, but he wants to hear Rick say what he feels anyway. “What do you mean?”

“It’s nature, y’know? It paints its own picture and writes its own poetry and sings its own song. And so much of poetry is about how history makes you feel, whether it’s personal history or this kind of history, right?”

Daryl lets out a low whistle. _Jesus, Rick_ , he thinks. There’s a little feeling of pride somewhere in him for taking Rick from the boy who said ‘poetry is dumb’ two weeks ago to this, someone who says things that speak to Daryl in a specific way, words that could’ve come right out of his own mouth. He bites his lip, and then smiles. “Gonna make a poet outta you yet,” he says quietly, taking another bite of his sandwich to cover the fact that he’s feeling like pouncing on Rick and that it’s probably showing on his face.

Rick grins and shrugs. “I figured you’d like it ‘cause of that. Nerd and all.” He winks at Daryl. “And I kinda like it for that too but also because I used to come here as a kid and it was always better this time of year. With the leaves all changing. I felt invincible here.”

“You don’t anymore?” Daryl asks.

“A little, maybe,” Rick says. “But now I kinda just come here when I’m feeling upset or impatient or tired ‘cause it _reminds_ me of how I felt when I was a kid. The park is peaceful and the ruins sorta remind me that I can do better or be better than whatever destructive shit I got goin’ on in my life at the time.”

God, Daryl wants to kiss him. He eats more of his sandwich instead.

“That’s really nice,” Daryl murmurs after a minute.

“Cheesy as shit, too, I know,” Rick says with a laugh. “Food okay?”

“Yeah, it’s great,” Daryl says, and sets his sandwich aside for a moment. “Roast beef’s actually my favourite.” He rubs his hands together, brushing crumbs away.

Rick smiles and simply says, “Good,” then lies down on his back, looking up at the sky. He doesn’t touch his food; instead, he spreads his arms across the blanket until one of his hands rests near Daryl’s leg, a bare inch away, and Daryl resists an urge to lean against his fingers, to briefly be touched by Rick, because every time he so much as breathes near Daryl, let alone touches him, it’s a privilege. But Daryl refuses to initiate contact like that out of desire rather than necessity. Last night, having Rick draped over him was out of need. Now, it would just be self-indulgent.

Daryl bites his lip and pushes away thoughts of Rick touching him in any way, innocent or not-so-innocent. And he doesn’t know what makes him decide to talk, only that it suddenly seems like a good time to explain his abrupt silence earlier. He really _doesn’t_ want to ruin this day, but sometimes, when Rick looks at him, Daryl can see the worry in his eyes. Not pity; Rick doesn’t pity him. But Rick looks at him like there’s always something unsaid, something he wants to tell Daryl maybe about how everything will be okay even though when he’s with Rick, Daryl kind of already believes it will.

“My father,” he begins, and Rick turns his head to look at him, leans up on his elbow.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Daryl.”

Daryl shakes his head. “No, I want to. Never told anyone and maybe that’s part of what’s made it so hard. My, uh… father. He used to beat me. Merle too, but me more often. Sometimes it would be because I made him mad, even though I couldn’t figure out for nothin’ how I made him so damn mad. Sometimes it would just be because he wanted to, though. He didn’t have anything else to do, so he’d take a belt to me. Or switch if we were out in the woods. He’d just do it until he felt like stopping.” Daryl laughs, and it’s bitter. “Sometimes it’d be just these long minutes of nothing but pain but they felt like hours. That’s when I found poetry.”

Daryl meets Rick’s eyes, and Rick smiles a little sadly. “And it helped,” he fills in.

Daryl nods. “Milton was the first thing that got me. _Paradise Lost_. You’ve heard of it I’m sure, everyone has.” Daryl pauses and then recites, “‘ _Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; and, in the lowest deep, a lower deep still threatening to devour me opens wide, to which the Hell I suffer seems a Heaven_.’ I don’t think Milton meant it how I took it but for me it kinda just made me think, the only thing worse than this is dyin’ and I can’t let him do that to me. It made me think I could make it through it because it was a piece of cake compared to y’know, being dead. It was still the shittiest thing in the world, but I made it out when I didn’t always know that I would.”

“I’m glad you did,” Rick says quietly, and he’s looking at Daryl so intently that Daryl has to look away. He picks up the cookie and takes a bite of it. And then he nearly chokes. He chews as quickly as possible, unable to prevent himself from making a face, and forces himself to swallow.

Rick, still watching him, bursts out laughing. “That bad, huh?”

Daryl holds up his hand and shakes his head, reaching for the bottle of water Rick brought for him and drinking a third of it in one go. “The fuck did you put in those?” he asks, gasping.

“I just did what the recipe said,” Rick replies sheepishly, almost defensively.

“You sure you measured everything right?” Daryl asks. “They taste more like flour than anything else.”

Rick cringes and his ears go red and damn it if that’s not the most adorable thing Daryl’s ever seen. Daryl goes back to eating his sandwich, the safer bet, because at least Rick didn’t make any of the ingredients himself, and Rick watches him for a minute before he sits up and sets his own cookie aside.

“Ohhh, no,” Daryl says, laughing and shaking his head. “I think you should have to try one, too.”

“I think you should hush and eat your sandwich,” Rick mutters and shoves them back into his bag.

He eyes his own sandwich but doesn’t eat and Daryl looks at him. “You poison the sandwiches, too?” he asks, innocently. “Should I be worried?”

Rick chuckles and shakes his head. “Nah. They’re fine, I swear. I’m just…” And then Rick looks up at him, frowning, and says something that makes Daryl remind himself for at least the tenth time today that this is definitely _not_ a date. “Can I ask you to do something important for me?”

And Rick’s voice is so earnest, so full of hope for what he hasn’t said yet, that he could be about to ask Daryl commit a murder with him next weekend and Daryl would probably say yes.

“What do you need?”.

Rick looks down at his knees, flushing with apparent embarrassment. “I sorta have this really big presentation thing coming up for my criminology class…” he pauses, his nose scrunches up in a way that makes Daryl’s heart swell, and then he mutters, “I’m kinda nervous.” Another pause. “And you said you don’t have classes on Monday so I was just gonna ask… would you sit in on my presentation? I’d feel less awkward with you there.”

And Daryl doesn’t even know what to say, because he’s pretty sure that if he agrees (and he’s going to, because who could turn Rick down), it’s going to be more awkward when Rick looks up to find Daryl staring at him with fuckin’ hearts in his eyes from the back row of the lecture hall. But he doesn’t have long to consider that, because his mouth is opening and saying the words, “Of course I will.” And Rick is smiling so big at him that it’s like being caught in a sunbeam.

“You’re the _best_ ,” Rick says emphatically. “I mean that. It sounds stupid but I dunno… you’re the calmest person I know and maybe it’ll help me stay calm, too.”

 _Calm_ , Daryl thinks. _Sure. Meanwhile there are butterflies trying to devour my insides_. But for Rick… for Rick, Daryl will be a fucking zen master if he has to.

#

When they arrive back on campus in late afternoon, Daryl unbuckles his seatbelt and turns to Rick.

“Thanks for today,” Daryl says. “It was fun. You had nothin’ to prove to me though, you know that, right?”

Rick shrugs. “Yeah, I know. But you’re a better friend than I deserve and I feel like I should be better for you, too.” Daryl’s stomach hurts with all the things that statement could mean, all the things it definitely _doesn’t_ mean. But he doesn’t say anything and Rick continues on. “And Daryl… thanks for trusting me enough to tell me what you told me. I’m here if you ever need anything, okay?”

“Yeah,” Daryl says. “I appreciate that. It’s nice that someone knows. It’s less to bear on my own.”

He opens the car door and hops out, then turns back to look at Rick. “You’re a _great_ friend,” he tells him, before shutting the door and slowly turning to walk back into his dorm building. It’s the closest he can get to saying _I love you_ without actually saying it, and despite how much he wishes he could say it, he’ll take what he can get. For now.


	7. Chapter 7

When Daryl opens the door of his dorm for Rick, Rick barrels past him, drops his stuff, kicks off his shoes, and flops face first onto Daryl’s bed. Daryl shuts the door behind him and turns to look at the boy sprawled out across his blankets and wonders exactly when Rick started feeling _this_ comfortable with him. Not that Daryl’s complaining, of course. He’d give his left arm to have Rick in his bed, always, and even if he’s currently got his clothes on… well, Daryl is still attempting to follow a steady diet of taking what he can get.

“Give it to me straight,” Rick says, and Daryl closes his eyes, bites his lip and forces himself not to make a quip about how he wants to give it to Rick in every way _but_ straight. “How’d I do?”

“You were perfect,” Daryl says, and means it. He’s not saying it just because he sat in the back row of Rick’s class and stared intently at him for 15 minutes while he did his presentation, telling his stomach to stop doing little flips just because Rick looked so goddamn gorgeous. He’s saying it because Rick literally was spot on. If he read poetry the way he just presented his findings on wrongful conviction, then he’d have absolutely nothing to worry about for their project.   
  
The small moment of nerves in which Rick had frowned, his mind gone blank about what he wanted to say next had been nothing; he’d glanced at Daryl, Daryl had shot him a reassuring smile, and he’d reconnected with his train of thought. Daryl had sat through three more of the presentations before sneaking out and texting Rick that he’d see him after, and not one of them had been as good or matched Rick’s energy.

Rick rolls over and looks at him. “Really?” he asks. “You can be honest with me.”

“I am,” Daryl promises. “Really, it was great. I learned a lot and you got a knack for the whole public speaking thing. A lot of passion and all that.”

Rick groans. “That’s the only thing that saved me,” he says. “That I’m passionate about the topic. And you being there was great. I was glad I had someone to look at and sort of talk to that wasn’t my professor or any of those shit-for-brains I have in my class.”

Daryl laughs. “Anytime, Rick.”

“Now all I gotta figure out is this damn poem. You know, I still haven’t gotten very far and it’s due on Thursday and you’re supposed to be lighting a fire under my ass here, Dixon.”

Daryl smiles at him. “Well, that’s why you’re here, right? We’ll get it done. Don’t worry.”

Rick rolls back over and plants his face in Daryl’s pillow. “All I _do_ is worry,” he says, his voice coming out muffled. He sighs heavily and then lifts his face from the pillow. “This smells really nice. What cologne do you wear?”

Daryl almost chokes on his own tongue. Either Rick just effectively told him that he smells nice, or he’s dreaming it, in which case, he’d like to wake up now because that’s just not fair.

“It’s, um. Cheap dime store cologne, to be honest,” Daryl admits. “And probably my shampoo, too.”

“Hmm,” Rick hums against the soft cotton of the pillowcase, and Daryl pinches the inside of his arm, _hard_ , because Rick is not lying on his bed practically fucking _huffing_ his pillow case. It just can’t be happening. “Nice,” he says again, and he gives Daryl an odd look that Daryl’s never seen before, just a flash of something secretive, and then it’s gone. He rolls over to the edge of the bed, grabs his backpack, and tugs his notebook out. He sits up and gives Daryl room to sit next to him, then drops his notebook into Daryl’s lap.

“You want me to read this?” Daryl asks.

Rick sighs and pulls the notebook back to him, flips open to the page he showed Daryl before with the same four lines on it, and drops it back onto his thighs. “Read what?” Rick says sarcastically. “Really, Daryl, I could learn to tap dance and probably pick it up easier than this.”

Daryl stares Rick in the eye and completely deadpan, says, “Tap dancing is a noble art.”

“Apparently, so is falling flat on your face which, speaking metaphorically, is exactly what I’m doing here.”

With more confidence than he actually feels, Daryl pats Rick on the back. “It’s okay. I promise, your poem will be great and it’ll be done on time and… look, how about we go out? Got a place I like to go that might inspire you. It’s not that far and we can take my bike.”

Rick perks up immediately, and Daryl doesn’t think that it’s because he’s all that interested in being inspired for his poem. The word ‘bike’ has made his eyes light up like sparklers, and he’s on his feet and getting his shoes back on so fast that Daryl has to laugh. “Alright, let’s go,” Rick says, and Daryl shakes his head.

“Okay, relax,” Daryl says with a laugh, “it’s still gonna be parked out back no matter how long we take gettin’ down there.”

Daryl slides on his jacket, and gestures at Rick’s backpack. “Bring your stuff with you. You’ll want it.” Then he bends down and reaches under his bed and pulls out two helmets. He’s never had a reason to have the other one, except for some misplaced hope that there might someday be someone else to use it. And beyond all his expectations, now there is. He hands the second one to Rick who takes it from him reverently, as if Daryl is making all his wildest dreams come true. “Okay,” Daryl says, “c’mon.”

#

Rick’s energy is infectious; he’s practically vibrating with it and Daryl can feel it. It’s impossible not to with Rick pressed tight against his back, his arms around Daryl, hands clasped just above the waist of his jeans, far too close for Daryl not to be getting ideas. He’s trying his best to focus so they don’t end up dead in a ditch somewhere, at which point, Rick’s hands on him won’t matter. Still, it’s hard not to straighten up into his grasp as the road rushes by under them, and it’s even harder not to take Rick’s hands in one of his own and push them even lower.

Just like Rick wouldn’t tell him where they were going two days before, Daryl hasn’t told Rick exactly where they’re headed. So when they arrive and Rick stumbles a little getting off his bike, Daryl has to smile at the look on his face when he tugs his helmet off.

“Christ, that was amazing. My legs feel like jelly, though,” Rick says with a chuckle. He looks around at their surroundings, at an overpass that runs across some old, abandoned railroad tracks, and raises an eyebrow at Daryl. “Where are we?”

“Patience,” Daryl says simply, pulling off his own helmet. He kicks the stand down on his bike and gets off, leaving his and Rick’s helmets with it and heading toward the overpass. Rick follows close behind, looking like he doesn’t know what to expect. They step through inches-deep piles of fallen leaves, bursting with red and orange-gold, the green of Atlanta’s trees having been lost to autumn, one last hurrah before the dullness of winter. Last night’s rain has pooled next to the tracks and traffic streams by above them, oblivious to what Daryl thinks qualifies as one of the world’s greatest wonders. The sun shines bright today, illuminating the cement walls beneath the overpass, and Daryl stops at the nearest edge of one wall, letting Rick take it all in.

“Wow,” Rick breathes, eyes going wide. “Is this all…”

“Poetry,” Daryl finishes for him. “Yeah. Some by local poets, some by famous ones. The walls are pretty full now but people used to come here and put up poems now and then, and then others found out about it and it sorta became a thing. Some of them were written specifically to answer other ones. Some people just write with a sharpie, some people stencil it with paint… then a few street artists came along and did some work between the poems.”

“Artsy nerd heaven,” Rick says with a laugh. “This is incredible.” He moves closer to the wall, starts walking along it slowly, taking in both words and pictures. He reaches up to touch the brightly coloured mane of a roaring lion with the words of a poem in its gaping maw, as if the detail in the art might translate to real fur that he can touch. His hand brushes down the wall, touching the words of Whitman and teenage runaways alike, Keats and Auden and a homeless girl that Daryl has met down here two or three times. It’s like watching his mind expand in real time. After a long moment of staring, of drinking it all in, Rick pauses and turns to look at him. “Did you write any of these?”

Daryl nods. “Yeah. A couple of ‘em are mine,” he says, and because he knows Rick is going to ask, he ushers him across the tracks to the other wall, and finds an old poem he wrote the year he graduated high school, pointing it out to Rick and standing behind him, watching only the back of him. The poem is nothing he wants to read again, or think about, really; that time in his life was so volatile and the words on the wall are angry. That’s just not him anymore.   
  
Of course, Daryl is still _angry_ ; he’s got enough anger in him for several people, but wanting Rick has easily been the best help for that. Even before this project, even before they were friends, Daryl had no time for being so angry when it was all he could do to think straight every time he saw Rick’s face. And now, with Rick around, his anger is no longer drowning him, and Daryl is finally breaking the surface of the water. Rick, as it turns out, is his oxygen.

But Rick seems to look at the poem a little differently. For Daryl, it is a bad memory, but for Rick, it’s something to be admired. He gently traces over the words on the cement, mouthing them as he touches each one. Back and forth, his eyes following his fingers, his expression almost… euphoric. “This is _beautiful_ ,” he says, and his voice is the soft kind of magic that Daryl has grown so used to.

“You think so?” Daryl asks, and Rick just nods. He steps back from the wall and turns to face Daryl, but he slips in the pooled rainwater as he moves closer to him. Daryl grabs Rick’s arm before he can fall, yanking him up toward him, effectively pulling Rick right into his arms. Daryl stumbles backward with the force of Rick colliding with him, but regains his balance quickly. And then they’re face to face, one of Daryl’s arms still around Rick’s waist.

“Sorry,” Daryl whispers at the same time that Rick says it, barely two inches between them, so close that Daryl can feel the warmth of Rick’s breath across his lips.

Rick’s eyes trace his face, glance at his mouth, and for one small, almost imperceptible second, that look from earlier is back, the strange, new one that looks like it hasn’t quite found its place on Rick’s face yet. And for one fraction of a moment, Daryl thinks Rick is going to kiss him. But then he’s pulling away calmly, looking down at himself and brushing dirt that isn’t there from his button-down.

“It’s okay,” Rick says, and then he keeps walking, moving back across the tracks to the other wall to examine more of the poetry, leaving Daryl to trail behind him, heart pounding like it’s going to beat right out of his chest. He stays a few feet behind Rick, teeth worrying at his bottom lip, eyes trailing further down than he should allow himself to look. He forces himself to keep his thoughts as clean as possible; the last thing he needs is to stand there pitching a tent in his fucking jeans just because he got it in his head to stare at Rick’s ass as if wanting him harder than he’s ever wanted anything is going to get him anywhere.

He groans under his breath and steps up next to Rick. “Anything helping the block?” he asks quietly, and Rick shrugs.

“Yeah, I think so. I wish I could write like this, though.” He sighs, then laughs. “That’s never been a concern of mine before, y’know? But feel like it’d be a disservice if I wrote a shitty poem after all you’ve taught me.”

Daryl waves a hand. “You won’t. I promise.”

“I think you’re biased because I’m your best friend,” Rick says.

“Oh,” Daryl answers, grinning. “Best friend? Well, I guess. I mean, there’s Michonne…”  
  
Rick laughs and smacks Daryl’s arm. “We’re best friends now and you know it. Only a best friend would put up with my awful poetry skills.”

Daryl hums in mock thoughtfulness for a moment. “Yeah, okay, that’s true.” They both laugh and Daryl nudges Rick’s shoulder with his own. “Seriously, though, I swear your poem will be amazing. Just put pen to paper. Don’t force it, just let it happen.”

“Right now?” Rick asks.

“Right now,” Daryl says, and he sits down on the rocks, up against the wall, away from the water. Rick follows suit and opens his backpack, digging out his notebook and a pen and flipping through to his poem.

“Pen to paper,” Rick says, as if to himself.  
  
“Pen to paper,” Daryl repeats. “You got this, Grimes.”

#

It doesn’t take Rick long to work out quite a few more lines, but he keeps his notebook turned away from Daryl’s curious eyes. “Not yet,” he keeps saying, a small smile on his lips that makes Daryl wonder exactly what in their surroundings inspired him. He’s not naïve enough to think it was Rick losing his balance and ending up in his arms, certainly not stupid enough to entertain the idea that it might have been the close encounter where their lips almost met but not quite.

But he will take credit for helping Rick past the writer’s block and maybe give himself a proverbial pat on the back for his ingenuity in bringing Rick here. He should have done it right at the start, but then again, he wouldn’t take back any of the days they’ve spent together since. If Rick had worked it out too quickly, maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to spend time with Daryl, maybe there wouldn’t be this friendship. Maybe there wouldn’t have been a moment in which Rick had put his arms around Daryl’s waist, pressed their bodies together, and given Daryl half a chance to know what being with him is like, even if he can’t actually have it.

When he’s done, he closes the notebook and shoves it into his backpack. “Not yet,” he says again when he sees Daryl’s disappointment. “Tomorrow maybe. I might be finished with it tonight.”

“Okay,” Daryl says. “Tomorrow. I’ll hold you to that.”  
  
“Hey, I said maybe,” Rick reminds him.   
  
“Maybe?” Daryl says. “What is this ‘ _maybe_ ’? Never heard of this word…”

Rick rolls his eyes and shakes his head, standing and giving Daryl a hand to help him to his feet. “Patience,” he laughs. “Like you tell me.”

Daryl pulls his hand from Rick’s before he can be tempted to hold on too long. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Rick says. “But not back to campus yet. Let’s take a detour.” And he starts striding back toward Daryl’s bike with purpose, as if he has any idea how to ride without Daryl.  
  
“Detour to where?” Daryl calls after him, hurrying to catch up.

Rick shrugs. “Anywhere. I just don’t wanna go back yet. Rather be with y --” Rick cuts himself off, a faint pink tinge appearing in his cheeks before he coughs a little belatedly, as if it’ll cover up the fact that he had been about to tell Daryl that he’d rather be with him. “Rather be out is all.”

Daryl just watches him carefully for a moment, fighting back a small smile. “Okay,” he says. “Anywhere. I can do that.”

When he settles back astride his bike and feels Rick arms go back around him, holding tighter even than before, Daryl thinks he really would go anywhere, for hours, as long as it means having this for as long as possible.

#

When Daryl stops in front of the frat house sometime after the sun has begun to set, it’s only to find a bunch of Rick’s frat brothers out on the lawn.

Rick is quick to let go of Daryl’s waist, quick enough that it almost stings a little. He removes himself from the bike, but not before Shane shouts, “Rick’s riding bitch! How’s it feel bein’ in the bitch seat, brother?” The group of guys bursts out in raucous laughter, and Rick shakes his head, removes his helmet and hands it back to Daryl. Daryl pulls off his own and looks up at Rick.

"Sorry, Shane’s a dick,” Rick mutters, turning to look at Shane and yelling back, “Shut the fuck up, Walsh!”

“You don’t have to hang out with me,” Daryl says quietly. “Know he’s actually your best friend.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Rick scoffs. “ _We’re_ best friends now, too, I told you that. Tough shit if they don’t like it.”

“They don’t like _me_ ,” Daryl says, and he tries not to let it bother him. Not being liked is his status quo, and he got used to that a long time before he met Rick. Still, he can’t lie and say it’s not a shitty fucking existence, because it really can be.

“ _I_ like you,” Rick says firmly, and then he seems to realise how that sounds, because he blushes furiously and mumbles, “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” He walks quickly back toward the house, gives Shane the stereotypical bro-hug, and Daryl sighs, turning around to go back up to his dorm.

It doesn’t matter what Rick says about them being friends, because it’s pretty clear he doesn’t want to be seen the way Shane seems to see them. Whatever Rick had meant by wanting to spend time with Daryl, whatever brief moment they had shared under the overpass, however tightly he had held on while they were on the bike together (tighter than was strictly necessary)... it was still pretty clear now to Daryl that if anyone insinuated there was something more, Rick would be the first to shoot it down.

Daryl wants it not to hurt so much; he wants not to feel like there’s a knife two inches from his back and Rick’s hand hovering over the handle. But no matter how pretty those eyes, how gorgeous that face, how sweet the sound of that voice, he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’s only going to end up hurt. It’s no longer a matter of if, but when, and Daryl’s gotten way too good at waiting for the other shoe to drop.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I fully expect I shall be stoned to death for the end of this chapter. ;) Enjoy!

“So he likes you.”

“Didn’t say that,” Daryl says quickly, hand slipping with the sugar shaker so that he pours something probably close to a quarter pound of it into his tea. Sighing, he pushes the mug aside. “Don’t know if he does. Don’t think he does, but… I hope.”

Michonne gives Daryl a rather knowing look and pushes her own untouched, still-steaming mug toward him, and Daryl goes easier on the sugar this time. “But you said he almost kissed you.”

“Think I imagined that,” Daryl admits, sipping the tea and absently twirling the spoon in his half-eaten oatmeal. “I mean, he was _this_ close to my face –” Daryl illustrates with one hand just how close Rick was. “And then he said sorry and walked away. And when we got back, Shane…”

Michonne waves a hand. “Say no more. Shane… well, he’s Shane.”

Daryl frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve known Rick all my life, y’know? But he came as part of a packaged deal. Like when you get something you want and they offer you a free gift and the free gift is never as good. I love Rick, but it was never just the two of us. It was the two of us and Shane, always. And any time it _was_ just me and Rick for more than two seconds, Shane would get jealous, and because he was jealous, he’d get mean. I was never his friend, too. I tried to be but I was always ‘that girl’ or it was ‘why you hangin’ out with _her,_ anyway?’ I mean, don’t quote me on jealousy being the only thing, ‘cause there might be… something _else_ there, too.” Michonne pauses as if she wants to elaborate, but doesn’t. “But Shane is really bad at knowing when to shut his mouth and he’s only nice if he doesn’t see you as a threat to the routine… _banality_ of his life. And that includes Rick.”

Daryl sighs and sinks back against the cracked leather of the diner booth. “Guess I should be takin’ it as a compliment that he sees me as threatening? Never been seen that way before.”

Michonne chuckles. “He eased up on me some about the time we got to high school. I never knew why, but maybe he just needs time to get used to you?”

Daryl groans. “Great. It took _that_ long? Even if me and Rick were together, we’d probably be 90 by the time Shane came around.”

Michonne nods. “Yeah, I know. And Rick can be oblivious as all hell, too. Not just about you but about Shane. I don’t think he sees all the things we do. Either that or he just forgives it too easy. Listen, Daryl, don’t worry about it too much. Clearly you got Rick hooked and that’s all you need to think about right now.”

“Mm,” Daryl says. “Maybe. Still not sure about that, but at least he’s hangin’ out with me, right? I’m tryin’ to take what I can get these days.”

Michonne shrugs. “Seems like a good plan.”

Daryl doesn’t buy the sudden innocent look on her face. “Spill it. What happened with Andrea?"

“Well… she kissed me, if that’s what you mean.”

“ _If that’s what you mean_ ,” Daryl imitates impatiently. “Of course that’s what I mean.” He leans in with interest. “How’d that happen?”

Another shrug. “I dunno. Just did. We were dancing at the party, and then we sorta became friends. And then we were discussing the lack of attractive guys at the party…”

Daryl rolls his eyes. “As a lesbian _would_ do…”

Michonne grins. “And then she kissed me.”

“Progress,” Daryl says. “How was it?”

Michonne frowns. “Well, she said it was nice but she threw up right after so…”

“She was wasted,” Daryl says, remembering the blonde on the dance floor a few days ago, drink in hand; privately, Daryl thinks she could have been dancing with a lamp post and not have known the difference. “I’m sure that’s all it was.”

“Right,” Michonne says. “She _was_ wasted. So she might not have known what she was doing and I can’t _really_ hold her to anything she said or did when she was drunk. And I haven’t seen her since.”

Daryl sighs. “Two of us really know what we’re doin’, huh?” He eats another spoonful of his oatmeal, but it’s gone cold and he pushes that away, too.

“That’s why I asked if you wanted to get breakfast,” Michonne says with a laugh. “Knew you’d understand how I feel.”

“I do,” Daryl mutters. He jumps when his phone abruptly vibrates, and he pulls it free of his pocket. “Speak of the devil.” He opens the text message from Rick.

**_Your room. Noon. Okay?_ ** **_  
_ **

He sends Rick a little thumbs up emoji, because that’s not the dorkiest thing he could possibly do or anything, and glances at the time – eleven-thirty already.

“Boyfriend expectin’ you returned home at a respectable hour?” Michonne asks sweetly, and Daryl mouths a swear word in her direction, cheeks going warm.

“He’s a lot of things, but late ain’t one of ‘em. We should probably go.”

Michonne shakes her head and slides out of the booth, the bill in hand, having already argued Daryl into a corner about paying for them both and eventually agreeing to let Daryl leave the tip if she could foot it. She’s a forceful presence, Michonne, and a lot of the fire that he sometimes lacks is behind her eyes. If someone like her can’t get the person she wants, there’s no hope for him in the slightest.

Daryl gets up from the table and meets her by the door and they walk out together, her arm slung around his shoulders while they stroll down the sidewalk to where she parked her car.  
  
“Don’t worry,” she tells him when they reach her Camaro, pausing to dig her keys out of her pocket. “We’ll be back in time and if we’re not… well, it’ll be cute if he’s worried about you, huh?”

#

Michonne makes him late on purpose. When Daryl gets inside his res hall, his phone is already buzzing, and presumably it’s a text from Rick and his on-the-nose sense of punctuality asking why it’s 12:10 and Daryl isn’t there. He takes the stairs two at a time up to the third floor and then jogs down the hall, turning the corner to find Rick sitting in front of his dorm door, his bag next to him.

“Sorry,” Daryl gasps, “I was out.”

Rick looks up at him and that look is back on his face again, the one that Daryl still hasn’t been able to figure out. It’s a mix of emotions, something foreign and unrecognisable to him and certainly something that, before yesterday, he had never seen on Rick’s face at all. And now it’s occurring more and more, and it’s as if he’s got something to say, something that he refuses to give away. Daryl can pull apart only threads of worry from it, worry and… jealousy? But no, it’s anything but that. Rick has nothing to be jealous of.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You just didn’t answer my text and then you didn’t answer the door and I thought… I was worried…”

“I answered your text,” Daryl says quickly, “I swear.” He pulls his phone out and opens up the messaging, and that’s when he sees that his little thumbs up didn’t send after all, that he must have hit a spot of shitty service in the diner after he got the text. Underneath, it says **_Message not sent. Retry?_ ** And Daryl’s heart thumps. He doesn’t know whether to feel bad that he made Rick worry, because despite how Michonne joked with him, the look on Rick’s face is not actually cute, or to feel some sense of satisfaction over the fact that Rick would feel the need to worry about him. His voice comes out sheepish. “But… I guess it didn’t send. I’m sorry.”

He offers Rick his hand but Rick doesn’t take it, just pushes himself up from the floor and looks at Daryl. “I thought after yesterday… I thought that you were mad at me.”

“Mad at you? Why?”

“The thing with Shane yesterday… he definitely doesn’t know when to shut his mouth. And I should stick up for you better than I did. So if you’re mad at me, I understand, but I just thought that’s why you didn’t answer my text or answer the door. I’m sorry, Daryl, I can’t seem to stop being an asshole.”  
  
And then he does something unexpected: he pulls Daryl into a hug. And not the one-armed bro-hug he’d given Shane the day before, but a real hug, his arms wrapped around Daryl’s back, head pressed in the space between his neck and shoulder, and by Daryl’s estimation, it lasts at least ten seconds longer than a hug between someone you’ve only been friends with for three weeks should probably last. But he doesn’t really know anything about that, because Rick’s the closest friend he’s ever had, and the only thing he can grasp at the moment is that Rick’s body feels so good against his, that he smells like Old Spice and coffee and suddenly, Daryl likes coffee a lot more. He’s hungry to keep holding Rick, to explore with his hands, but that would be a bad idea, likely the worst he’s had yet. _I have gone marking the atlas of your body…_ Neruda wrote, and god, would Daryl like to.  
  
But Daryl pulls away before he does something stupid like rubbing Rick’s back, or worse. “I’m not mad at you,” he says, and it’s true, even though he wants to be, even though he thinks he probably should be. He wants Rick to prove that he means what he says about their friendship, not just in here where they’re alone and no one can see them, but out in public, too, where the world casts a leery eye on the golden boy and what looks like his charity case of a friend. Christ, it’s not like he’s looking for a public declaration of Rick’s undying love (although he certainly wouldn’t say no), but Rick is right. He should have stood up for him better. Still, even if a part of Daryl wants to push him away, he’s not sure he’s capable of that, and Rick does seem awfully genuine.

“I’m glad,” Rick says, and he smiles at Daryl, and it really is like being faced with sunshine. Daryl smiles back and slips past Rick to slide his ID through the keycard reader on his door. Rick grabs his bag and Daryl ushers him inside.

Contrary to the boy who was so comfortable here just 24 hours earlier, Rick waits for permission to sit down on Daryl’s bed, carefully kicking his shoes off and tucking his legs up underneath him. “So, listen,” he says, “I’m done with my poem, I think, and I thought maybe we could nail down the last of it all today. You _have_ started, right?”

If Daryl is honest, he’s barely thought about his poem. He’s been delaying writing it as long as possible, mostly to have a reason to not show it to Rick until the last minute, but also because he’s not sure how to measure out everything he feels for Rick into doses small enough to fit into a poem. But now it _is_ the last minute, with only today and tomorrow standing between the two of them and their presentation, and Daryl has to start working before he has nothing to show for the weeks he’s spent with Rick. It’s certainly not for a lack of material after all that time spent together, that’s for damn sure.

Still, he’s not about to lie to Rick, so he says, “I, uh… might be running a little bit behind.” Rick grins, his mouth opening, perhaps to chastise him, so Daryl cuts him off, adding, “Do I get to see yours now?”

Rick leans down and drags his bag closer to Daryl’s bed while Daryl sits down next to him, closer than perhaps he should. But Rick doesn’t seem to mind, pulling his notebook out and pressing it into Daryl’s hands. “Be honest, okay? It might be really bad. I mean, where we went yesterday helped and I was reading some Neruda and Cummings last night to get more inspired --”  
  
“You read Cummings?” Daryl says. As if he didn’t want Rick enough already. “I _love_ Cummings.”  
  
“Yeah,” Rick says. “I’ve been reading poetry a lot more lately, wonder why that is.” He smirks at Daryl. “I turned down the corner of the page it’s on.”

Daryl opens the notebook and flips to the right page, and, with Rick’s eyes on him, waiting to see his reaction, Daryl begins to read.  
  
_Find me in a thunderstorm_  
_Persuade me to keep my head down_  
_I have been waiting on a lightning strike_  
_But you would hardly want the rain for me_  
_And I had never prayed until I saw the shape of your mouth_  
_The way you hold yourself_  
_The way you smile when you don’t believe that anyone is looking_  
_(I’ve been looking)_  
_I had never prayed until I found you_  
_And then I found my knees on the ground_  
_My hands clasped and my tongue begging_  
_My head down_  
_And it turned out you were the thunderstorm_  
_You were the lightning strike_  
_And you wanted after all_  
_The same thing that I wanted:_  
_Lightning to strike twice_  
_Or three times_  
_Or a million_  
_So I made myself a lightning rod_  
_And lifted my head to the sky_  
  
Daryl’s heart begins to race halfway through and doesn’t let up, and he wonders if it might actually be exploding. He can’t tell if it’s swelling up, about to burst, or if it’s collapsing in on itself. This poem, this lovely thing, these words that are about someone else and not about him… but they _are_ beautiful, and that’s what he’s supposed to comment on. So he reads it one more time, waits until his throat stops trying to seize up on him, and says, in a voice as clear as he can force it to be, “Wow, Rick.”  
  
“It’s… is it okay?” Rick asks. “I mean, you know I’ve never done this before, so I thought --”  
  
“It’s perfect,” Daryl says quickly, firmly, and he meets Rick’s eyes even though he’s sure looking at him is going to turn his own cheeks the colour of a fire hydrant. “You have a gift for this.”  
  
Rick sighs with relief and shakes his head. “No, I don’t. It’s only ‘cause of you, I mean, you taught me about all this stuff.”  
  
“But it didn’t come from me,” Daryl argues. “I can only teach you so much, I can’t tell you what to write. I mean, all I did was show you some books and what the inside of the library looks like…”  
  
Rick laughs. “Oh, shut it, Dixon, I’d been there before.”  
  
Daryl smiles, glad that the joke seems to have broken the tense feeling in his chest and the set of his shoulders. “Point is, I didn’t write it for you. This was all you, and it’s really, really good. Wouldn’t just say that. Wouldn’t lie to you.”  
  
“Thanks,” Rick says. “I mean it, thank you.”  
  
“Of course,” Daryl says. He turns back to the poem and starts reading through it again. He can feel Rick’s eyes still on him, and out of the corner of his eye, he can see Rick reaching up and tugging at a stray curl, pulling it down and letting it bounce free, over and over. There’s a sudden nervous energy about him, and it’s making Daryl antsy now, too; he can feel his face growing warm again under the intensity of Rick’s gaze. He reaches the end of the poem once more, and turns to look at Rick again.

There’s a second where starts to open his mouth (whether to ask Rick what’s up, or to comment on his poem, he’s not sure), but before he can say anything, and long before he can grasp the full meaning of what’s happening, Rick is leaning in, one hand on Daryl’s knee, and brushing his mouth across Daryl’s.  
  
Daryl thinks his heart actually stops, because everything is silent. He hears nothing -- not the cars going by in the street below, not the normal noises of people heading to class, not the ever-constant slamming of dorm doors around him. Certainly not his own heartbeat even though he expects to hear it banging against the inside of his ribcage like a timpani drum. It’s just the barest touch of lips to lips, but it steals all of Daryl’s breath anyway, and it’s only out of shock that he pulls away because if he could comprehend exactly what just occurred, he’d never in a million years let Rick’s mouth away from his again.  
  
And his mouth won’t move now, won’t form words, won’t say something, _anything_ ; and despite the fact that Daryl expects to feel something like his own death creeping up on him, all he feels is _stunned_.  
  
And then the silence is broken. Panic washes over Rick’s face, and his voice comes out a hoarse whisper. “Shit, I’m -- I’m sorry, Daryl, I didn’t -- I thought -- I have to go.” And then he’s off Daryl’s bed like a shot, neglecting to grab his things, tugging on his shoes and bolting from the room, door shutting hard behind him. And Daryl finally finds the sense to call after him, only after he’s already gone.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, now I _know_ I'm going to be stoned to death for this one. Enjoy! (:

It’s weird going to the frat house when he isn’t supposed to be there, Daryl thinks, and weirder still to be pacing on the porch, Rick’s bag in hand, trying to work up the courage to knock. He’s sure it’s not going to be a big deal, he’s sure it’s going to be like going to anyone else’s house. Knock, tell whichever badly dressed frat boy who answers that he’s here to see Rick, and be let inside. It’s not like he hasn’t been here before, but it was different when he was invited. And he definitely doesn’t belong here anymore than he did when he did have an invitation.

It’s only when he realises that the conversation he’s here to have is infinitely more petrifying than knocking that he finally works up the nerve. There’s a door on the inside that’s going to be much harder to knock on, and so it spurs him on to just get this one out of the way. He curls his hand into a fist and knocks three times.

The boy who opens the door is tall with a mess of brown hair and an unshaven jaw, and he squints at Daryl from the dark of the house as if he hasn’t seen daylight in a week. “What?” he says, and it’s less than cordial but far from rude, so Daryl clears his throat.

“I need to see Rick. He here?” Daryl really hopes that he is; he can’t think of anywhere else Rick would’ve gone besides the woods at Sweetwater Creek, but that seems a bit far for a boy running away after an unexpected kiss.

“Uh huh,” the guy says and he turns, walking back into the house, and it’s easier than Daryl would’ve thought to gain access to whatever secret sanctum the guys here clearly think they have.

“Who is it, Spencer?” another guy yells, and the one who is apparently Spencer jabs a thumb at Daryl over his shoulder.

“That guy,” Spencer says. “Rick’s friend or whatever.”

Daryl keeps a dirty look to himself and ignores them all, heading for the stairs. He remembers dragging Rick up them just a few days ago, and he hadn’t thought then that he’d be here right now, going after Rick like he’s in some damn romantic comedy, to find out if a kiss was only a kiss or if it’s what he wants it to be.

_Don’t say it was a mistake,_ Daryl thinks. _Please. Whatever it was… don’t call it a mistake._

He reaches the top and his legs feel strange underneath him while he makes his way down the hall to Rick’s room. The door is shut when he gets there, and he pauses for a long time, hand raised to knock, trying to convince himself that he needs to do it, that if Rick doesn’t want to talk to him, then at the very least, Daryl needs to return his things to him.

Daryl takes a deep breath, but before his knuckles can make contact with the door, it opens. Rick has a look on his face that makes Daryl’s chest hurt, and he wants to put a hand on his shoulder, or hug him, or… anything that isn’t standing even two feet from him, wondering what happens now.

“Saw the shadow under the door,” Rick says, answering an unasked question about how he knew Daryl was standing there. “Anyone else woulda just barged in, so I assumed it could only be you.”

He stands aside, and Daryl passes again into his room. He wants to look around now in the daylight, but he keeps his eyes on Rick, watching as he closes the door and retreats back to the bed, sitting down. He offers Daryl a spot next to him, but backs away as soon as he sits down so there’s a good three feet of space between them. He folds his arms across his chest, closing himself off, so different from his body language literally every other time they’ve been together. Daryl tries not to take it personally and sets Rick’s bag on the floor near the bed.

“I brought your stuff,” Daryl says, unnecessarily. “And I just – I wanted to see if you were okay.”

Rick sucks in a hard breath, looks somewhere in the vicinity of Daryl’s left shoulder and says shakily, “I kissed you.” As if Daryl hadn’t been there.

“M’aware,” Daryl murmurs, trying to keep things light, but it couldn’t be clearer that Rick is in a state of panic, of uncertainty, and so he sighs. “Look, Rick… we don’t have to talk about it. We can just forget it happened.” And it’s not what he wants, not even close, but he can’t force Rick to make it into a thing if he doesn’t want it to be.

“I _kissed_ you,” Rick repeats softly.

“I know.”

“I don’t know why –” Rick begins, but Daryl edges closer, reaches out and touches his arm, and says the one thing he knows to be true in all of this.

“Because you wanted to.”

Rick exhales heavily, pushing both hands up through his hair, and Daryl lets his hand fall, tries to hold back from touching Rick when he's really not sure if he's allowed to right now, if that's what he's supposed to be doing. Rick takes another deep breath before he meets Daryl’s eyes. “Yeah. I… I wanted to. I don’t really know what that means for me.”

The look on Rick’s face brings Daryl back to a memory he hasn’t thought about in a long time, in which he was in this exact same state, panicking and scared when he realised that he was having feelings for a boy. It brings him back to memories of trying so hard to hide, of the ensuing beating when his father found out. And he knows it’s different for Rick, but he refuses to let the first thing Rick hears when he’s just starting to work it out be that he’s weird or wrong or anything other than entirely normal.

“Doesn’t have to mean anything,” Daryl says. “Rick, it can mean you’re gay, or bisexual, or any other mind-numbing number of things. Or it can just be what it is. It’s your decision but it’s not one you have to make this second.”

But Rick doesn’t seem to hear any of this. “You hated it,” he says, but his tone isn’t accusatory, just worried. “You hated it when I kissed you.”

“No,” Daryl whispers. “No, Rick, I didn’t. I just – you know when you’ve waited so long for somethin’, and then it happens, and your mind can’t process that it _finally_ did? That’s what that was. That’s _all_ that was.” 

And Rick sighs, so, so heavy. His voice is weak, like a child admitting to a wrongdoing, when he says, “I didn’t forget.”

“What?”

“I remember what I said to you the night of the party. I didn’t forget. I just thought it would be easier if I said I didn’t. For me. If I didn’t have to face it.”

“That I’m in love with you,” Daryl says, not looking at him.

“Yeah,” Rick says.

“So why are you worried? You know I’ve wanted you.”

And Rick laughs, but it’s half-humourless. “Because this came out of nowhere, Daryl. I swear. One day, you were just my partner for this project, and then you were my friend, and then… fuck, it was so quick, Daryl. _So_ fucking fast, it was like someone flipped a switch and I wanted something else and I didn’t know how I could, because I didn’t think I was – I don’t know. And then I’ve been _such_ a dick and it would be real fucking ironic, y’know, if you started to not like me right at the moment I started falling for you. I mean, you said you were _out_ earlier, and I thought -- ” 

Daryl shakes his head and rubs a hand across his face, and he smiles, looking back at Rick. “I was out with _Michonne_ , Rick. And god, it probably woulda been less stressful if I had gotten over you, but there was no danger of that happening. Christ, I’ve been into you since last year, you know that? Second I laid eyes on you, I had it so bad and it was so stupid ‘cause I knew it was never gonna happen.” 

“And now?”

“And now we’re actually friends and I actually am in love with you and I’m sorry if that scares you, but I can’t help it, Rick. I really can’t.”

“Sometimes you just want what you want,” Rick says. “Guess I’m learning that.”

“And what do you want?” Daryl asks him, and he tries not to let his eyes light up, tries to keep his voice from sounding hopeful.

“It’s new to me,” Rick says after a long pause, and he finally meets Daryl’s eyes again. “But I want you.”

He reaches out a hand and lays it on the bed, and Daryl tangles his fingers up with Rick’s.

“ _Are_ you scared?” Daryl asks. 

Rick swallows hard. “Terrified.”

And then Rick is closing the distance between them and they’re kissing again, a _real_ kiss, and it is everything. Not just everything Daryl wanted it to be, but _everything_ : a sunrise, a rushing river, laughter, the moon. Daryl doesn’t pull away this time, doesn’t give Rick any reason to believe he doesn’t want this because he’s never wanted anything so much in his life. There’s a soft moan and Daryl thinks it’s him that’s making that sound but it’s not, it’s Rick, and Daryl’s breath catches in his throat at the realisation. Rick’s hand is at the back of his neck, fingers tangled loosely in his hair, and Daryl can’t stop kissing him, is praying to whatever god will listen that he doesn’t ever have to.

Rick pulls away after a long time, breathless, hand still on Daryl’s neck, and he looks at Daryl with eyes gone dark with something Daryl thinks might be arousal.

“Oh my god,” Rick pants. “I didn’t think –”

“Didn’t think it would be good?”

“Knew it would be,” Rick says, “just didn’t know it would be _that_ good. Can we…?”

“Keep doing it?” Daryl supplies. “All fuckin’ day, I hope.”

Daryl tries to keep it all linear in his head, how he moves from A to B, how they go from the first kiss to the second to what must be the hundredth, and it feels like a dream, making out with Rick. And Rick is good, so beyond good, maneuvering them so that Daryl is lying back on the bed, head buried in the pillow, Rick on top of him, all lips and tongue and roaming hands. There’s a warm feeling growing way down deep in Daryl’s belly, and he can’t tell if it’s the mere pleasure of being kissed this way, or if it’s because he’s kissing _Rick_ , and god, his mind still won’t wrap around the fact that he’s even kissing him at all. The weight of his body on top of Daryl’s is paradise, and Daryl wants his legs tangled up with Rick’s like this for the rest of the day, the rest of his life.

When Rick finally pulls away, his hand moves to Daryl’s cheek and he presses his forehead against him. “We can – we can stop,” Daryl whispers, chest heaving, lungs seeking oxygen that he’s not sharing with Rick. “If it’s too much, or too fast.”

“No,” Rick says, “it’s not, I just… wanna do this, okay? I need to.”

And Daryl isn’t sure what he means, but then Rick is kissing his neck, and Daryl can’t make sense of anything because it might not be _too_ fast but it is fast. An hour and a half ago, Rick was just barely brushing his mouth across Daryl’s, and now they’re here, and facing the extent of Rick’s desire, a desire Daryl didn’t know he had, is hitting Daryl full force like a train. It’s working its way inside and up his spine until he’s shuddering under Rick and tipping his head back, letting Rick press kisses all along his throat.

“Okay,” Daryl breathes, because he can’t argue with that. Right now, he’d let Rick do damn near anything, and this is good, this is _perfect_. He can’t wait to see the marks Rick is going to leave, the claim he’s going to lay and suddenly, it doesn’t matter if anyone knows who did it, just that they know he belongs to someone, someone whose teeth he is more than okay with bearing bite marks from.

Rick tugs aside the collar of his shirt and Daryl can’t help pushing up against his mouth when he scrapes his teeth along Daryl’s collarbone, nipping and licking and sucking and god, having imagined this for so long doesn’t come close to doing it justice. All bets are off with Rick lying on top of him; Daryl can feel his cock pressing against his own, hard, and even through two layers of jeans, it’s an utterly exquisite feeling.

And then, holy _fuck_ , Rick is rolling his hips downward, slow and steady, dragging denim across denim and god, the friction is unlike anything else Daryl has ever felt in his life. There are moments he remembers feeling utter euphoria: the first time on his bike, the first time he ever left home, the first time he read Neruda, but this tops the list. Daryl shudders, makes a whimpering sound he doesn’t think he can be held accountable for, and rocks his own hips up to meet Rick every time he thrusts down against him. Whatever happens here today, he’s sure it’s not going to last long. This alone makes Daryl’s fingers curl into Rick’s blankets, the other hand coming up to slide into Rick’s back pocket, pulling them together harder, faster.

Time slows down with Rick on top of him like this, every slow, methodical roll of his hips driving Daryl absolutely insane. But this is anything but going through the motions. Daryl’s brain is still trying to grasp the fact that this is not a dream, that this is _real_ , that he’s here in Rick’s bed with Rick rubbing against him, face buried against Daryl’s neck, one hand in his hair. And then Rick’s free hand finds the one tugging at the sheets and he locks their fingers together, holding tight to Daryl’s hand, and that above everything is perfect beyond measure.

Any time Daryl has fantasised about being with Rick like this, it’s lasted an embarrassingly short amount of time, and it’s shaping up quite the same in real life, just as Daryl thought it might. He keeps pushing himself up against Rick, aching for more, but he’s already rapidly approaching an edge from which he can’t return. Rick lifts his head up to meet Daryl’s eyes, and he’s biting his lip, making soft sounds at the back of his throat, and it’s this that makes Daryl really moan.

Rick squeezes Daryl’s hand and whispers, “Shhh. Gotta be quiet, Daryl, so many people here.”

Daryl nods, back arching beneath Rick, trying to keep his noises to himself. It’s not easy when Rick is _so_ close to making him come in his pants; a minute more and Daryl is gonna lose it. 

Rick’s clearly not far behind; he barely swallows a gasp, the hand in Daryl’s hair pushing it away from his eyes, and Daryl almost can’t stand to look him in the eye like this, it’s so fucking intimate. “Really close,” he whispers. “Fuck, _Daryl_ \--”

And then, without warning, the door bangs open and hits the wall behind it loud enough to startle the dead. Someone is saying Rick’s name, then a loud curse word, and suddenly, Rick is on his feet, leaving Daryl lying on the bed, his chest heaving, staring blankly over at Shane in the doorway. He’s a deer in the headlights, unable to process what’s happening, to make himself move, to do anything at all that would make this less a situation from a bad movie. But it plays out just like he expects it to in that moment.

“Jesus fucking _Christ_ , Rick… please tell me that is _not_ what it looked like!”

Rick gapes for a second before he finds his voice. “Get the fuck _out_ , Shane!” He moves toward the door, shoves Shane out into the hallway, and slams it behind him.

There’s a commotion in the hall and Shane is shouting something unintelligible, whether to Rick or to someone else, Daryl can’t tell. And then Rick is turning to look at Daryl with utter panic and genuine fear on his face, and something else, too. Something that looks a lot like the obvious feeling in Shane’s voice: disgust.

“You need to go,” he whispers. Everything they talked about before – in that second, it’s like it never even happened. It’s like the last half hour never occurred. Barely a minute ago, Rick was on top of him, and now the vibe in the room is so cold that there might as well be a wall of ice between them.

Daryl sits up, still trying to catch his breath. “Rick, please,” he starts, but Rick shakes his head, looks away and refuses to look back at him.

“Go. Please. Just – just get _out_ , Daryl.”

And he steps aside, flinging the door back open, showing Daryl out and slamming it once more behind him. After that, it’s like an echo of every walk down the halls of his high school, leaving the frat house; every step is one step toward someone who looks at him with disdain, without a care for how it might feel to be the object of the jokes he knows they’ll make for weeks to come. Almost _all_ of Rick’s frat brothers appear to be in the hall or at the foot of the stairs, peering up at Daryl with blatant curiosity, staring open-mouthed or laughing silently, watching him go. His face burns hot with a shame he hasn’t felt in a long time, and the anger he’d so successfully kept locked away since meeting Rick boils over, makes his insides burn, too.

And just like that, everything is ruined.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I quite literally just had my heart broken by a dude I've loved for a very long time like, two days ago. So I poured about half my heart into this chapter and I hope it comes through. Enjoy.

Daryl’s always felt free on his bike. It’s always been able to take him anywhere, and it’s different than being in a car. It feels more like flying and that’s good, because he’s never needed to get away faster than he does right now. Still, it feels like nowhere his bike could take him is far enough from the disaster he just left behind. His whole body is still alive with Rick’s touch, but that fire is quickly dying, like every inch of him is a candle being extinguished.

Daryl goes to the only place he knows he can be alone. The upside to the walls of the overpass being nearly too full to fit anymore art or poetry is that it’s a rarity for people to come here now, so Daryl really is alone when he settles into the spot he sat in with Rick just the other day. It’s just as cold as it was then, the autumn chill sending a shiver down his spine, but without Rick here with him, it feels like subzero. He closes his eyes, tips his head back against the wall, and tries to just breathe, even though his chest feels tight and he thinks his heart might physically burst.

In all the poetry he’s ever read, there’s never been a single line, a single word that explains how to deal with this. They express the heartache, the heartbreak, sure, but they’ve never quite told him how to get over it. How to survive, but not how to separate himself from it, to lock it away in a corner of his mind where he will not think on it often. Instead, at this moment, it’s _all_ he can think of. 

The worst of it is that he can still feel the weight of Rick on top of him, the utter ecstasy of Rick’s mouth on his mouth, on his neck, one hand laced with one of Daryl’s, the other buried in his hair. The soft, quiet moans still echo in his ears; the way Rick said his name when he was right on the edge, braced on a precipice, not just of his own release but of never going back. And maybe if he’d just fallen over it, there would still be a way for this to work, but Daryl knows it can’t anymore.

Because along with all of that, Daryl can still hear Rick’s voice telling him to get out, to leave. He can still picture the disgusted look on his face, not just the fear but the _revulsion_ , and Daryl knows it was directed at him. He can feel the vibration in his bones of a slamming door behind him, soft snickers hidden behind hands, Shane’s look of self-satisfaction mixed with an appalled sense of pearl-clutching shock and loathing. And just days ago, Daryl would have told himself that he would have been okay if it had never happened, he would have moved on, even if it took ‘til graduation to get there. And then Rick kissed him, then Rick took him into his bed and touched him and held him with the intent of more, the _promise_ of more. And then it was over, done with, just like that. And now there’s an ache somewhere under his ribs, a tension in him like the way it feels when it’s too cold and impossible to get warm, and _nothing_ is okay. 

As if to add salt to his wounds, Daryl’s phone buzzes in his pocket. He reaches into his jacket with shaking fingers and pulls it out, finding a text message from Rick. With trepidation, he opens it.

**_I don’t think we should see each other until the presentation._ ** **_  
_ **

Just that. Nothing else. No explanation, no apology, no indication of anything aside from not wanting to see him until Thursday. Daryl tells himself that it’s less than two days away, but another part of him, caught up in the pain of the last hour of his life, reminds himself that Thursday won’t change anything. How could it? They will go into class, do their presentation, and then it will be over. Thanksgiving break will come and go, then winter break, then the rest of his college life with Rick at a distance when he was so, _so_ close what feels like moments ago. 

Daryl doesn’t know whether to blame himself or to blame Rick or to blame Shane. Neither he or Rick had thought to lock the door; neither of them knew what was going to happen, and even with the anger he feels right now at Rick’s quick dismissal of him (first in kicking him out and then with the text message), Shane shouldn’t have just walked in. And so it’s easiest to blame him the most, to be furious and rageful for the way he burst in like he owned the place and then walked out and, presumably, told everyone within earshot what he’d just seen.

And that’s what really pisses Daryl off the most. That Shane had thought he had the right to run his mouth. Daryl wants to be forgiving, to make allowances because he clearly didn’t know Daryl was there, and most people would have had a stunned reaction to walking in on their best friend in that sort of position. But he can’t, because the one thing he’s goddamn sure of is that in no world does a sudden shock mean you must tell everyone that your best friend, if that’s what he really is to you, just got caught in bed with another boy. What Michonne told him yesterday about Shane holds true.

And so it’s her that he turns to in his moment of feeling utterly lost. He deletes the text from Rick; he’s done looking at it and he can’t sit there all day trying to work out what the hell is going on in Rick’s mind from one sentence. Instead, he opens a new message to Michonne, and texts her a sentence of his own:

**_I think me and Rick are done._ **

Daryl barely has to wait thirty seconds before his phone is blaring out some obnoxious ringtone that came pre-installed on his phone, and he answers it, making a mental note to join the current era and change it to something he actually likes.

“Where are you?” Michonne asks in lieu of a hello. He gives her some directions and there’s brief chatter in the background. “Maggie’s with me, can I bring her?”

“Sure, bring Maggie,” Daryl says, before adding heavily, “and bring booze.”  


#  


For once, Maggie is utterly silent. There’s sympathy in her eyes, but if there’s also a snarky remark on her tongue about Rick, she keeps it to herself. Michonne, however, usually watchful and silent, is on the warpath.

“I’ll kill him,” she says, pacing back and forth in front of Maggie and Daryl. Daryl doesn’t even know if she means Rick or Shane, so he takes another drink of the rum Maggie brought, and listens to Michonne rage. “What the hell was he thinking?”

Daryl swallows, coughs a little, and mutters, “That I’m not worth being scared over. Not worth fighting for.”

“Fuck that,” Maggie finally says. “Present company excluded, you’re the best thing to ever happen to that idiot.”

Michonne nods in agreement and finally sits down next to Daryl. “Daryl, you haven’t known him long enough to see the difference, and maybe I was stupid enough to not realise it was because of you at first, but he’s been so happy since he met you. I’m not gonna defend his stupidity to you but he’s never been as happy as he pretends to be in that stupid frat and recently… man, the change has been like night and day. I know he’s scared but that doesn’t excuse kicking you out like that. He’s not the only one who just got humiliated for something no one should be humiliated for. And he’s too far up Walsh’s ass to realise it’s him he should be pushing away.”

Daryl clutches the bottle between his knees and buries his face into his hands. He has a lump in his throat the size of a beach ball, but somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice that sounds like his father’s says _boys don’t cry._ And so Daryl doesn’t, even though it would be easy, even though it might help to shake free the tight ball of anger in his chest. He blinks back the burning in his eyes, swallows the need to cry along with the alcohol, and lets Michonne and Maggie curse Rick’s name, even though they were his friends first. 

“I’m gonna have to get over him,” Daryl says after a long while. “I don’t know how to do that. Just thinking about it…”

Michonne rubs his shoulder and Maggie ruffles up his hair, kissing the side of his head. “Look,” Maggie says. “I promise you will. Won’t be easy but you will. And maybe when I’m done kickin’ his ass from here to the next century, he’ll see what a mistake he made.”

“Yeah,” Daryl mutters, even though he has no hope of that, even though he has no hope at all of even beginning to move on. Rick brought out the better parts of him, kept his past at bay, and when he kissed him… Jesus Christ, Daryl wanted the elation of it to last, wanted the feeling of lightness in him that made him feel like walking down the street and telling everybody he met that Rick Grimes is the greatest thing known to mankind to last forever. And that might be the thing that hurts the most: that after everything, he still feels like Rick has something to offer him that he can’t get anywhere else. He wants to shut that off, to turn off his feelings like a lightswitch, but he can’t.

Daryl has drunk himself half to sleep by the time the sun begins going down, only stopping when Maggie pulls the bottle from his hand, when he doesn’t have enough energy left to put up a fight. Michonne helps him up and leads him to Maggie’s truck, and leaving him in the front seat, they load his bike into the back, then sandwich him in and start driving back to campus. Daryl would feel more pathetic if he felt much at all, but his head is swimming almost pleasantly now, and he can’t think about much of anything other than crawling into bed and sleeping for a week. Not that he can do that either no matter how much he wants to.

Michonne helps him upstairs and because she’s way too damn nice, helps him undress for bed. Daryl has a brief moment of comprehension that Michonne is seeing the scars he hasn’t told her about, but other than a small, sharp intake of breath, she says nothing, and so he says nothing, too. Someday he’ll tell her the way he told Rick, someday he’ll tell her how it feels to have told the darkest parts of himself to someone and to have his pain expanded upon instead of made better.   
  
Michonne puts him to bed and grabs a bottle of water from his mini fridge and leaves it on the desk for him. He’s only vaguely aware that it’s barely evening, only vaguely aware of Michonne closing the door behind her, only vaguely aware that he’s even awake at all… 

And then there’s nothing.

#  


Daryl wakes up sometime close to midnight, mouth dry and stomach screaming at him for the alcohol, the lack of actual substance in him. On the one hand, he doesn’t feel the urge to throw up, but on the other, his head aches like a bitch. He sits up slowly and sips at the water Michonne left for him, then slides back down in the bed and rolls over to face the wall. He stares at it, or really, at the pitch dark until his eyes cross, but he can’t get back to sleep. Daryl thinks about getting up to find some aspirin or some food or both, but instead, he savours the pain, names it after Rick, wonders if this is all Rick will be to him from now on – a headache and hunger pangs.

Daryl groans and rolls back over, fumbling for the lamp on his desk, hand falling on a book instead. He picks it up and finally finds the lamp switch, but he doesn’t need the light to know which book it is. The well worn cover under his hand makes it obvious that it’s one of his Neruda books. The spine is ragged, even more so now from Rick’s constant grabbing for the book when they’ve been here working on their project. And it stings even more, knowing all the places where Rick’s touch has been – not just on him, but in here, where Daryl keeps the private things about himself, where Rick has come time and time again and made himself at home. Where they’d made a hideout away from the rest of the world. Only now it’s Daryl hiding from Rick, Rick across campus hiding from him, and the only thing left in the open is Daryl’s heart, out on the curb in the mud, like trash.

Even so, when Daryl sets Neruda aside and picks up a pen and a notebook, settling in to finally write his poem, it begins as a love poem. He presses hard with the tip of the pen as if by damn near carving the words into the paper, he can rewrite the last day, the last few weeks, the last year of loving Rick, of wanting him. As if by connecting one letter to the next in a stream of words he’s not even sure make sense, he can change it, make it the way he wants it, make Rick love him and want him and be unafraid to hold him, even though Daryl understands that fear. But he only gets halfway through before the words trail off in his mind, before he remembers that he cannot reach a hand into a universe he had no part in creating and rearrange the plot threads to his liking. Before he remembers that the exact moment you consider the present, it’s already in the process of becoming the past, and there is no changing that. His hand falters, drags the pen across the page in a short, sharp line, and he stops.

Daryl tears out the page, casts it to the floor, and gives in instead to something he can manipulate and use, something he can mold into a final product. He taps into shame and anger and _hurt_ , his own fear, into the memory of how a hard spike of pleasure deep in his belly became a shard of ice in his spine so quickly. And he carves the words into the paper still, presses so hard that it tears through in places to the next piece, filling the tiny valleys of his letters with ink and wishing like hell that ink were temporary, erasable, that he could smudge his hand across it and come away with the words in his palm. That he could be able to hold them there, remember Rick’s hand in his and then set them free like birds. But the anger stays in his chest and the words stay on the page, and when Daryl finishes writing, it looks like rows of jagged teeth between each line, snapping and snarling and feeding on his rage with a bottomless, never satisfied hunger.   


#  


Rick takes the seat next to Daryl when he comes in on Thursday morning, and Daryl tries not to, but he can’t help the way he flinches away from Rick’s arm next to his. Rick opens his mouth to speak, but Daryl doesn’t want to hear it if he’s about to apologise, or worse, if he’s not, and the next thing out of his mouth is something equally as painful as “get out.” He holds up a hand. “Let’s just get through this, okay?”

Rick’s jaw tightens and he frowns, but nods. “Yeah. Okay.”

Rick pulls out his poem and the few pages of research they’ve done on Neruda. Much of it was Daryl’s own knowledge fact-checked against some books and a handful of Internet sources, but there’s a sour feeling in his stomach now thinking about Neruda. He knows that he didn’t only write about love, but it’s what he’s best known for, all that ardor and amourous language, and it makes Daryl’s head ache. _So much love_ , he thinks. _They wonder if you were murdered but love’s the thing that probably really killed you in the end because that’s all it does. Takes and takes and takes._ _  
_

Daryl digs his own poem out of his bag. He hasn’t felt much like leaving his room in the last day to go to the library and type it up, so it’s still on its original paper. He wonders if Rick will be able to feel the anger in his words when he sees them, if he’ll be able to look at them and know how much he hurt him, be able to read them and feel an ounce of regret.

Daryl holds it tight in his hand and tries to still it from shaking, but it won’t. And when they get called to the front of the room to present, Daryl stands and leaves Rick to trail behind him, not wanting to look at him, because he’s mad and also because despite it all, he still feels weak in the knees when he looks at Rick. He trains his eyes on his classmates instead, on his professor in the front row, on the wall behind them all – anywhere but on Rick.

They still work seamlessly together. One of them will talk and then the other, detailing Neruda’s life briefly, discussing his work, his death, the lab results from just a few months ago that gave more questions than answers about whether Neruda had died on his own or been killed for his beliefs. And for a moment, everything feels alright again, until Rick holds out his poem to Daryl, until Daryl has to reach out and take it. He meets Rick’s eyes briefly, and there’s only confusion in them, as if he doesn’t know what he’s done and damn it, he should _know._ _  
_

Daryl reads Rick’s poem in a bored tone because it’s that or read it through gritted teeth and he’s trying for civility. It’s all a lie anyway, all this about falling in love and wanting him and _praying_ and whatever. Daryl reads it and tries not to _read_ it, because he felt it before and he just doesn’t want to feel it again right now, not after Rick’s betrayal. 

All the same, the class sees what Daryl saw: a great poem. They clap for him and their professor praises him, in disbelief that it came from him. “Clearly,” she says with a wide smile, “Mr Dixon has been a wonderful influence on you.”

“Yes,” Rick says quietly. “He has.”

He shifts uncomfortably next to Daryl, and their professor nods, holds out a hand to invite them to continue. Daryl passes his own poem to Rick, hand still shaking, and looks straight at the floor while Rick begins to read aloud with the sort of passion Daryl taught him he should have.

“ _The poets say it’s better to love and then to lose_  
 _Than never to have risked it_  
 _Better to try and fail_  
 _Than never to have given it half a chance_  
 _But I gave myself to you in spades_  
 _And for just a moment, I felt the pleasant weight of your embrace_  
 _A brevity of hands and lips and legs_  
 _A half second of flying high enough to float away into the stratosphere_  
 _No sweeter drug than you –_  
 _your hands in my hair, your mouth on mine –_  
 _Until the high wore off_  
 _Your skin on mine was such satisfying sin –_  
 _I would have gone to hell for you and then I did_  
 _The taste of your name was like sugar_  
 _Until it soured on my tongue_  
 _And so I tell them that it isn’t better to lose_  
 _That I would have been better off to stay away_  
 _Than settle into orbit with you_  
 _My moon to your sun_  
 _And watch myself burn_  
 _And for everything that I have done_  
 _You are just one more poem I won’t write –_ ” 

And right then, Daryl can’t stand to listen to his own words anymore, to the sudden tremor in Rick’s voice as if he has any right to read it like that. He walks swiftly away, a lump in his throat, cutting Rick off and taking the steps up two at a time to the back of the lecture hall. He grabs his bag before pushing the door open and walking out, letting it slam behind him.

But it opens again just as quickly, and Rick rushes out of the room after him, Daryl’s poem still clutched in his hand. He reaches out to put a hand on Daryl’s shoulder, but Daryl wrenches himself away from Rick’s grasp and whirls around.

“What, Rick?” he spits out. “What do you want?”

“This… your poem is about me.”

“Wow, let’s sign you up for Mensa for working that one out,” Daryl says viciously. “What the fuck do you think?”

“This is… how you feel?” Rick says, voice tight with something like sadness that Daryl doesn’t think he has any right to feel right now.

“Obviously,” Daryl snaps.

Rick looks down at the paper in his hand, and his voice is soft when he reads the final lines. “ _You are just one more poem I won’t write, and now that I know the cost of loving you…”_

Daryl’s voice is all fury when he quotes his own final line at Rick. “ _I won’t pick up my pen again.”_

Ricks breath catches as if he didn’t expect all of this. As if he couldn’t have, as if he didn’t have the last day and a half to think about what he’s done. “Daryl, I didn’t mean – I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Too late.”

Daryl turns to walk away and Rick starts to follow, but Daryl looks back at him, all the anger and heartbreak he feels surely showing on his face. He holds up a hand to stop him. “Get away from me, Rick. Right now. Just get the fuck _away_.”


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoy this chapter. If you all hop on one foot for fifteen minutes straight, howl at the moon, and tell ten strangers that Rick and Daryl are totes fucking, there might be another chapter up by the weekend. 
> 
> Note: there will probably be another chapter by the weekend regardless, the above would just be fun for me to hear about. ;)

_I yelled at him_ , Daryl thinks. _I fucking yelled at him._ He shuts the door to his dorm behind himself and slumps against it, sliding down to the floor, exhausted both in body and mind. He tries to tell himself that Rick deserves it, because he kind of does, but maybe he went too far. Daryl doesn’t know how to make sense of any of this. So much of this is new. His feelings for Rick have gone far beyond what he’s ever felt for anybody and now that it’s all a mess, he just doesn’t know how to handle it. 

But then, new to him too was the way Rick had touched him. Not just in the moments before it all fell to pieces, but in the weeks before when Rick had touched him here or there, and for the first time in his life, Daryl hadn’t felt the need to maintain space away from someone’s hands or body. Daryl hasn’t known what it is until now to be touched by someone out of love or friendship, and Rick knows that, and so it hurts more to know that Rick gave and took away, somewhere between one breath and the next.

All Daryl wants is to understand, but he really doesn’t. There’s no no mathematical or chemical equation, no reference guide for this. Sure, all the bookstores have self-help sections, and he knows there are a hundred thousand blogs all detailing how terrible love is and what to do when you find yourself simultaneously in love and wanting to set yourself on fire. But he can’t go online or into a bookstore and search under G for _Grimes, Rick_ and find a personalised manual on how to navigate Rick’s behavior and its fallout, how to make him understand that as much as Daryl is his own man, as much as he has never and will never belong to anyone… he still belonged in ways to Rick. Still does. And against his better judgment, still wants to. 

Daryl pushes his hands into his hair. _Fuck you, Rick,_ he thinks. _It’s me, don’t you get that? I’m the only one who can make you feel this way. I’m the only one who can make you moan the way you did in that fleeing moment we had._ _  
_

But then Daryl turns on himself just as quickly, snaps at himself, _Don’t be so goddamn arrogant. A hundred boys, a hundred girls could do what you did… Rick’s own right hand could give him something better than what you think you gave him._ _  
_

And it goes on like this – Daryl warring with himself, with the things he can’t get his head around, with Rick’s distance, with the opposing forces of the two of them pushing each other away. With the idea that he’s good enough for Rick and that he isn’t, maybe all at the same time. He’s unsure how long he sits there, whether it’s minutes or hours, but eventually, he finds the energy to stand, to move to the bed, to lie down and bury his face against his pillow, to tell himself that Thanksgiving is coming. It’s almost Friday, the weekend will be here soon, and by Tuesday night, he’ll be as close to alone as one can get, with everybody gone home and no one to answer to. Nobody to watch him mourn the loss of something he barely had to begin with.

#

Michonne sits next to Daryl in their gender and sexuality class on Friday, taking her own notes and doodling on the edge of Daryl’s. Not that Daryl could really call them notes; a line here or there that barely makes sense does not a note sheet make. He can’t help his distraction, though, and he knows Michonne will let him borrow hers when it comes time to study for the final. In the meantime, Daryl does write a note –  to Michonne in the margins of his paper, angling it toward her for her to read.

_Have you seen him?_ She looks at him, sighs, and nods slowly. Daryl scrawls another note. _He okay?_ _  
_

She shrugs and writes a note back. _Never seen anyone be so contrite and defiant at the same time._ _  
_

Contrite. Apologetic. The way Rick had tried to be when Daryl had walked out of their presentation yesterday. And defiant, which Daryl takes to mean that, as he suspected, nothing is going to change. He sighs too, tries to push his thoughts aside, and writes another note.

_How’s the Andrea project?_ _  
_

Michonne flashes him a thumbs up and a broad grin, writing, _Movie date, Sunday night._ _  
_

And despite the way Daryl feels like his life is in pieces, he can’t help but be happy for her. He smiles, and writes back, _At least one of us succeeded. Good for you._ _  
_

She reaches over and squeezes his hand in thanks, or in sympathy, or both, then writes _Shopping trip after class? You can help me find something to wear. I hear you gays are good with fashion._ _  
_

Daryl snorts out a laugh and tries to cover it up, putting his face in his arm and trying to be silent. A student in front of him turns around and hisses “shhh!” at him and he just shakes his head. But it’s the first laugh he’s had in days and he whispers, “That’s a stereotype and you know it. In what world d’you think I’m good with fashion?” He gestures at himself, at old jeans, a ratty Skynyrd shirt that’s seen better days (perhaps in the 70s when it was printed).

She grins, leaning over and whispering back, “Got you to laugh, though.”

And because Michonne has been a damn good friend to him, taking his side when she’s known Rick as long as she has, Daryl agrees to go shopping with her. The worst that could happen is he gives her terrible advice and she wears a terrible outfit. But in the end, if it’s as promising as it sounds, said outfit will probably just end up on Andrea’s floor, and none of it will matter.

#  


“No.” Michonne’s voice is dry, deadpan, utterly flat, but insistent. “Never.”

“It’s nice,” Daryl says. “I mean, for a dress. I don’t really know a lot about this kind of thing. But it’s nice.”

Michonne squints at it. “Where’s the rest of it?”

“That’s all of it.”

“I want to seduce her, not show up completely naked. Too short for me.”

“ _You’re_ short,” Daryl says, and Michonne glares. 

“I’m average. You’ve got _maybe_ three inches over me. Don’t mess with me, Dixon. What else did you find? Because none of what I found is going to happen.” 

Daryl sighs and hangs the dress back on the rack a few feet away and moves back to the chairs outside the dressing room, picking up a skirt that the tag says is about $30 dollars more expensive than Daryl thinks it’s worth. But this is the fourth store they’ve been to, and he’s running out of things to say that make him sound vaguely like he knows what he’s talking about, and he’s desperate for Michonne to buy _anything_ at this point. 

“It’s, um… not short?”

Michonne raises an eyebrow. “It looks like my grandmother’s wallpaper.”

“What? No, this is nice. You should show off your legs, you have nice legs.”

Michonne rolls her eyes and waves a hand. “I’m not showing off my legs in _that_.” 

Daryl sighs and holds up another dress that Michonne vetoes immediately, before he even says anything. “Maybe you should just wear jeans,” Daryl says, utterly exasperated. “I mean, it’s a movie date, you’re not going to a five star restaurant, right?”

Michonne smirks. “Dunno, I’m thinking about eating out after.”

Daryl wrinkles up his nose. “You’re disgusting. Now pick something and let’s get out of this over-perfumed hellhole.”

The girl at the counter a few feet away shoots Daryl a dirty look and Daryl gives her one back. Michonne starts digging through the rest of the pile of things Daryl found that he thought would look good on her, even though fashion is so firmly out of the realm of his life as to be completely alien. He sighs and turns away toward the doors of the store and watches the stream of people pass by, all bored senior citizens and college students with nothing better to do on a Friday night than troll the mall.

For a second, Daryl imagines any one of them could be Rick, and then he sees a flash of curls above the head of someone else and his feet make an instinctive move toward the door. But he stops when he remembers that whatever he and Rick had, they don’t have it now. When he realises that whatever he thinks he saw wasn’t what he wanted it to be.

“You that desperate to leave?” Michonne asks, examining the price of a shirt with a low whistle and putting it aside.

“No, I thought I just saw – nevermind,” he mutters.

She rubs a hand across Daryl’s back briefly. “Hey, don’t worry. That happens sometimes. You start seeing ‘em everywhere. It’ll pass.”

“Sure,” Daryl says, and drops into a chair. He gestures at the sheer, magenta coloured blouse Michonne is holding. “Go with that. I think that’s the one.”

Michonne turns toward the mirror and holds it up to herself, making a noise of consideration. “I’ll try it on,” she says. “Be right back.”

Daryl’s eyes turn back toward the people out in the main areas of the mall, and he searches for curls but doesn’t see them. Definitely a figment of his imagination. When Michonne comes out, Daryl puts on the happiest face he can and nods. “Yeah, that’s the one,” he says. “Wear that.”

Michonne buys the blouse and the cashier looks like she couldn’t be happier to see the back of them (or at least Daryl) when they go. Michonne carries the bag over one arm and wraps the other around Daryl’s shoulders. “Come on. Milkshakes before we go.”

Michonne drags him off to Häagen-Dazs and springs for a Belgian chocolate milkshake for each of them. Daryl tries to pay for his own, but Michonne insists that it’s a reward for following her around the mall for two hours. Daryl thinks it’s really because she feels sad for him, but he appreciates the faux-explanation regardless.

Daryl leans against the counter while they wait for their shakes, eyes sweeping the mall. He knows he’s still looking, even though he shouldn’t be. There’s a split second where he thinks he sees Rick again, and after that, he forces himself to turn away because he knows Michonne is watching him.

"I swear, I keep seeing him,” he sighs.

"Look at me instead," Michonne says, and she sounds solemn, so Daryl does.

"Yeah?" Daryl asks, waiting, but Michonne shrugs.

"No pep talk, just wanted you to look at me. I'm prettier than Rick anyway."

Daryl laughs and she hugs him to her side. "I don't know what I did to deserve a friend like you," Daryl says earnestly, and he really means it.

"You're a good person," she tells him. "And right now I think you need me more than he does. It might've been different if it were just a matter of figuring himself out, and I understand that more than most people, y'know? But he never should’ve tossed you out that way and made you do some kind of bullshit walk of shame alone. At the least, you could’ve faced it together."

"That's what I thought, too," Daryl murmurs. The kid behind the counter comes back with their shakes, and Michonne hands one off to Daryl.

"Drink up, stop looking for him, and forget him for a few minutes. You have chocolate now."

Daryl nods and sips at his shake as they walk back through the mall toward the other end where Michonne parked. And Daryl tries, he really does, and he maybe manages it for a half minute, but it's all for naught when they reach the doors leading out to the parking lot. There, coming up to the doors just beside them, are Rick and Shane. And neither of them are figments of Daryl’s imagination because Michonne sees them and tenses up, too. Daryl pushes past, heads out into the parking lot, tries to shrink into obscurity or invisibility, but Rick would have to be blind to miss them. He and Shane follow them out and Daryl stops even though he wants to keep walking, wants to ignore them, and turns to look at Rick.

Rick approaches almost cautiously, takes a few steps in Daryl’s direction before stopping. Shane and Michonne stay back, both tense, like this is some sort of duel, like they're Rick and Daryl's seconds, ready to step in at a moment’s notice.

"Daryl, hi. Sorry, I didn't know you were gonna be here."

"Free country, Rick. We're allowed to be in the same place at the same time."

"Right, yeah. I just meant I know you don't wanna see me, so I'll just... we'll go."

Daryl tries to bite his tongue, but he just can't help himself, and he hisses out, "Great. Have fun with that asshole."

Rick frowns. "Daryl, come on. He's sorry. He didn't – he's not a bad person."

"You're seriously gonna defend that prick to me right now? After what he did to me? To _you_?"

But Shane hears that one and takes a few quick strides until he's standing right in front of Daryl. "The fuck you call me?"

And even though Shane is bigger than he is, not taller but certainly more imposing, Daryl looks him directly in the eye. "Called you what you are. Fucking prick."

"You know, I should kick the shit outta you for that big mouth, but you're not even worth my time." He pauses and then sneers at Daryl. "And you're _definitely_ not worth Rick's." 

Shane starts to turn away but Daryl doesn't let him. He's had enough of Shane's bullshit, enough of the way he talks down to him. And maybe Daryl's thought the same thing a hundred times, maybe Rick proved it when he kicked him out, but Shane doesn't get to say that, doesn't get to fuck everything up and get away with it. And that's what makes Daryl curl one hand into a fist, still holding his shake in the other hand, and before Shane can even see it coming, he draws it back and lands a punch straight in his face.

There's enough force behind it for Shane to stumble backward, and there's a brief moment of no reaction before he lunges at Daryl, but Rick grabs him hard around the waist, pulls him back. "SHANE!" he barks. "Let it go, man, just walk away!"

Shane wipes a hand across his nose, and comes away with blood on his knuckles, just like there’s blood on Daryl’s now. "Are you kidding me?!"

But Rick gives him a look and points toward the other end of the parking lot where his SUV is parked. "Walk away." And for some reason Daryl doesn't get, because Shane is not the type to take orders, he obeys.

Michonne is behind Daryl now, one hand on his shoulder, tugging him away. "C'mon, let's go." Daryl starts to leave with her, but then Rick speaks to him, so he turns back.

"You don't get what really happened, do you?" Rick says quietly.

"No, _you_ don't get it, Rick. You let me think we were gonna be something and then you tossed me aside without a second thought." 

Rick frowns again and shakes his head. "That’s what you think. Yeah, okay, I don't get it, maybe. But _you_ don't either." 

And then he walks away too, following Shane, and Daryl turns back toward Michonne. He trails behind her on the way across the parking lot to her car, hand smarting from the force of his punch, mind reeling a hundred times faster than before.

"What does that even mean, I ‘don't _get it_ ,’” Daryl snaps. "What the fuck is there to get?"

Michonne shrugs. "Maybe he thinks there's something you're missing? I dunno, I'll never really understand what goes on in that boy’s head.”

"Seems pretty damn transparent to me," Daryl mutters.

Michonne unlocks her car and  stops to look at him for a moment. "You're hurt," she tells him. "He's hurt too, even if he made his own bed. I think you both see it different ways. And maybe the same way too, but there's just no way right now to translate it into something you both can understand. Maybe you’ll get there."

"Maybe," Daryl says, but he doesn’t tell her he has little hope of that. He settles into the Camaro and leans his head against the door the whole way back to campus, mulling over Rick's words and his face and the sight of blood and his own bruised knuckles.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Surprise! Next chapter came earlier than expected, even for me. Bless my temporary beta, skarlatha, for being so willing to read and beta for me early... not that I had to twist her arm much. :D Enjoy!

“Touch any of my pieces and die,” Daryl says, cheerfully, reaching for his wallet and standing up so he can run downstairs for the pizza that he, Maggie and Michonne have ordered.

Maggie holds up her hands. “Wouldn’t dream of it. I heard you made Walsh bleed.”

Daryl laughs a little. “Yeah. Well, that was a one time thing. I’m not actually _that_ violent, y’know.”

“Yeah, until I take your fake Monopoly money and suddenly you’re turning green and bursting out of your clothes.”

Daryl pulls the door open and winks at her. “Oh, Maggie. If you wanted to see me out of my clothes, all you had to do was ask.”

Daryl shuts the door before she can answer and heads downstairs to meet the pizza guy. He’s enjoying his time with them before they leave tomorrow afternoon, and honestly, it takes his mind off Rick a little bit, having something to do before he has to see him again tomorrow in their last class before break. Not only that, but it’s Monday and Daryl’s sure there is no such thing as a decent Monday in college, so it’s nice to end this one with a board game and more pizza than three people could possibly eat.

Daryl steps outside just as the pizza guy pulls into the parking lot. He gets out and comes around to meet Daryl, holding the bag in one hand, and a receipt in the other. “So that’s $29.85,” the guy – Glenn, according to his nametag – tells him, and Daryl starts digging through his wallet.

As he does, he hears a whistle from above him. He glances upward and finds Maggie with her head out his window, looking down at them. “Hey pizza boy! You got somewhere to be tonight?”

Daryl closes his eyes and shakes his head. “Sorry,” he tells Glenn. “My friends are insane.”

“And _hot_ ,” Glenn says. “Who’s that?”

Daryl groans. “Her name is Maggie. She’d eat you alive.”

Glenn shrugs a little as Daryl hands him $35 and tells him to keep the change. “I’d be okay with that.” He lift his head and looks up at Maggie. “Sorry, I gotta work!”

“Shame,” she yells back. “You’re pretty cute!”

There’s brief chatter and then Maggie disappears from the window, presumably because Michonne pulled her back. But that doesn’t last long and a moment later, she’s leaning back through the window. “How ‘bout you write your number on the receipt and I’ll text you when you’re _not_ working?”

“Seriously?!” Daryl shouts. “It’s a pizza delivery, not a booty call!”

“Mind your beeswax, Dixon. I grab ‘em where I can. So what do you say, pizza boy?”

The pizza boy laughs, grinning up at her. “You’re on! It’s Glenn, by the way!”

“Nice to meet you, Glenn. Thanks for the pizza!”

“Thanks for the best delivery I’ve had all week!” Glenn yells back, and he scribbles his number on the receipt before handing it and the pizza to Daryl. “Enjoy.” And there’s a little bounce in his step as he walks back around his car to get in.

Daryl shakes his head and goes back inside. He has to laugh, because if he doesn’t, he’ll just be bitter that everyone seems to be getting something in the way of relationships except for him. Michonne has been grinning all day about her date with Andrea (he can’t count the number of times the words ‘I got laid’ have come out of her mouth today), and all Maggie has to do is tell someone they’re cute to get a number. He shakes his head, resigns himself to the idea that he has a less than zero chance of ending up with the person he really wants to be with more than anything in the world, and returns to his Monopoly game with Michonne and Maggie. Tomorrow, he’ll be alone, and he’s suddenly not so sure he’s okay with that.

#

Michonne hugs Daryl tight to her outside the building where Daryl has his poetry class. “You sure you don’t want to skip it and just come home with me for break?”

Daryl shakes his head. “Nah, I can’t. I’d feel too much like a burden.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” she admonishes. “You’re not a burden, Daryl. My mom would love you. And feed you ‘til you burst.” Michonne pokes him in the ribs. “You probably need it.”

“It’s okay,” he tells her. “I’m gonna do a mini dinner for myself and just spend my time on Netflix. I promise I’m not gonna mope the whole time.”

“You better not. Listen, I’m not that far away if you need anything or if you change your mind, okay? Text me if you need to.”

He promises he will and she hugs him again and kisses his forehead, heading off toward her car. Daryl watches her go, then takes a deep breath and heads inside. He climbs the stairs as slowly as possible, hoping to delay the inevitable, but he knows there’s no way to put it off.

When he steps inside the classroom, Rick is already there. He’s up at the front of the room, deep in discussion with their professor, who looks up when she sees Daryl has arrived and beckons him over. _Shit_ , Daryl thinks. He’d completely forgotten about the presentation, the rather dramatic exit he and Rick had made, whether that would impact their grade or not. He steels himself and puts his stuff in a chair in the back row and heads toward the front.

“Mr Dixon,” his professor says. “I’m glad you’re here. I was just talking to Rick about your presentation the other day –”

He interrupts her and begins apologising profusely. “I’m so sorry I walked out like that,” he begins. “That was extremely rude and irresponsible of me –”

“Daryl, Daryl. Calm down. Don’t worry. Rick explained everything.”

“He did?”

“He told me you just got your heart broken,” she says, quietly, discreetly, as if their other classmates couldn’t have guessed why he walked out. “He explained that your poem was about that and it was really personal and you needed time to deal with it.”

“Oh,” Daryl says, and he briefly meets Rick’s eyes, finds that contrition that Michonne mentioned, as well as a hard look of determination, the same one he’d seen the other day after punching Shane in the face.  
  
“Yeah, I didn’t think… I didn’t mean for it to go like that.”

But his professor smiles. “Well, I’ll be honest, it’s the first time anything like that’s ever happened and while I’m sorry that you got your heart broken, your poem was incredible and I think your… shall we say, _untimely exit_ , really made everyone feel it. That alone made me give the two of you an A. Your project was well researched and both poems were wonderful. Rick made sure to send me the full text of your poem via e-mail.”

“Oh,” Daryl says again. “Um. Great. Thank you for understanding.”

His professor pats his shoulder. “I know I’m a hard ass but I also know you guys deal with things outside of this classroom. I’m not cruel enough to not give you a pass for extenuating circumstances. And we’ve all had broken hearts, Daryl. I know how much of an extenuating circumstance it can be. Still, well done.”

She dismisses them and Daryl returns to the back row, Rick on his heels. Rick takes a seat a row ahead of him, and they don’t speak to each other until the end of the class when their professor releases them early with a wish for a Happy Thanksgiving.

“So… we got an A,” Rick says, coming up behind Daryl as he leaves the room, offering a small smile. “That’s good.”

“Yeah, great,” Daryl says, turning around to look at him. “Wasn’t worth it.”

Rick’s face falls and his voice is quiet when he says, “I still think our time together was worth it.”

“For a while.”

“But not now,” Rick says. “You don’t think any of it was worth it now.”

Daryl sighs, and for a moment, it feels like something is cracking open inside him, releasing so much pent up tension in one fell swoop. “Rick, I’m just resigned to this at this point. What else do we have left to say to each other? We tried, didn’t we? You fucked up, and maybe I fucked up, too, I don’t know. But what’s done is done. I need time to move on now, okay? I just need time. Have a good break.”

Rick’s voice cracks, just a little bit when he says, “Okay.” Daryl turns away, walks away, barely hears it when Rick calls after him, “Have a good break.”

#

Daryl spends Tuesday night eating leftover pizza and marathoning The X-Files on Netflix. More accurately, he spends the night eating leftover pizza, and continually going back to rewatch all that he’s missing on The X-Files while he thinks about Rick. He can’t help it. There was such a finality in his own words, and he regrets that now, regrets the way he made Rick look like he’d just punched _him_ in the face, too. He keeps trying to tell himself that this is just the result of what happened, that this is Rick’s fault, but more and more, he’s examining his own part in it.

Daryl asks himself over and over, _Did I come on too strong? Did I love him too much too soon? Was I too obvious? Did I pressure him? Did he really want me or did I just make him think he did in some way? Was Shane the cause or just the catalyst for something that was already going to happen? Was this ever going to work?_ _  
_

Round and round he goes until he’s no longer only blaming Rick or Shane, but himself, too. He wonders what he could have done differently, done better. He wonders how he let his anger control him so much that he couldn’t see past it, how he let his hurt feelings consume him so completely that he couldn’t even begin to wonder how Rick was dealing with it. All of this has been new to him, but it’s even newer to Rick, and Daryl feels like throwing up when he thinks of how he abandoned Rick to his own uncertainty. He knows what that’s like, he knows how much of a vicious wolf discovering the truth of yourself can be.

Daryl remembers Rick telling him one day about early criminal justice, about the code of Hammurabi, about _lex talionis –_ an eye for an eye _._ And it’s easy now to see just how blind that’s made him. Rick threw him out, but Daryl paid him back by not even trying to understand his fear, his uncertainty, and any other reason he may have had for what he did. And maybe it doesn’t excuse it, but Rick has taught him again and again about justice the last few weeks, about how reasons differ from excuses, about how reasons don’t always justify but they help you understand. And now he knows that Rick was right. He didn’t get it. And now he does. And much as he thought Rick had let it all fall apart, he’s been complicit in it the whole time.

Daryl finally does cry. It doesn’t last long, a few minutes at best, but the burning in his eyes is too much to hold back. He presses his face against his pillow, pushes his laptop aside on his desk, and for just a little while, lets his emotions do what they will. He deserves to be sad, deserves to be angry with himself, deserves to be regretful, deserves to feel the weight of grieving the thing he helped destroy.

He falls asleep this way, pillow wet, eyes rubbed raw, a bursting dam of feeling roiling inside him.

#

Daryl wakes early to the sound of pouring rain, to the sound of his phone ringing on his desk. He fumbles around for it, barely awake, and when he finds it, holds it up to his face to look at it. He doesn’t even think about it when he swipes across the screen to answer it, doesn’t even think about the fact that the screen says _Rick_ until Rick’s voice answers his sleepy hello.

“Come outside.”

 _That_ wakes Daryl up. He rolls out of his bed, stumbles to his feet and moves to the window, phone in hand, looking out into the pouring rain at Rick. His SUV is parked next to Daryl’s bike in the near-empty parking lot, and he’s holding his phone in one hand and an umbrella in the other.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Daryl asks, stunned.

“Come outside and you’ll see.”

And despite all the soul-searching he’s done, Daryl doesn’t think that’s wise. It’s better if he stays in here, punishes himself for his part in all of this, just lets Rick go and moves on. He doesn’t deserve Rick, but he can’t even get himself to say all of that, so he settles with something now familiar to him. “Rick,” Daryl says heavily, “I don’t want to talk to you. I told you that.”

“Well, tough shit,” Rick says. “I drove all the way here and I will scale the fucking building if I have to just to get you to talk to me. Now come outside. _Please_.”  
  
And if there’s anything Daryl knows about Rick, it’s once he sets his mind on something, he’s determined to finish it. He’d break down the damn door if he had to, and Daryl knows it, so he hangs up, gets his shoes on, and tugs a hoodie over his head. It won’t be much protection from the downpour, but he figures he won’t be out there long. Long enough to tell Rick to his face to just go home, that nobody asked him to come back here, that nobody… nobody wants him here right now, even if it’s the biggest lie Daryl’s ever told.

He shoves his ID into his pocket and heads down to the parking lot. The rain shows no signs of stopping and it soaks him as soon as he steps outside. But he strolls toward Rick’s car, hands buried in the pocket of his hoodie.

He meets Rick around the front of his SUV, keeps a few feet of distance between them. “You’re alone,” Rick begins.

Daryl frowns because okay, that kind of hurts to be reminded of. “Thanks for pointing out the obvious. Did you come here just to emphasise that you have a place to go for Thanksgiving and I don’t?”

Rick’s eyebrows furrow. “Is that really the kind of person you think I am, Daryl? Of course I didn’t. I just… you’re alone, right now. And it’s my fault.”

But if Daryl is going to take responsibility for what he’s done, he wants Rick to take responsibility for things _he’s_ actually done, too – not for things he hasn’t. “No, it ain’t. It’s just what happens when your life is shitty, Rick. You don’t go home and you’re always alone.”

Rick turns his face away for a moment and then looks back at Daryl. He has to raise his voice to be heard over the rain. “Daryl, please. Can we just go inside and talk?”

“No,” Daryl tells him, because he knows the second he invites Rick inside, he’ll cave and just let it all go, and they need to work this out. They need to work it out now, even if it’s raining, even if it’s inconvenient.

“Fine, then will you at least listen to me? You are alone because of me, because I fucked it up. Daryl, I was…” He steps closer but Daryl steps back, not ready for this proximity just yet. Rick makes a noise in his throat that sounds like he’s been wounded. “I was gonna invite you home with me for Thanksgiving. Even before – even before I realised I was developing feelings for you. And then I screwed that all up and I knew I couldn’t. Even if I did, you wouldn’t come, so I just left, and I realise now that was worse because I left you here by yourself and you probably thought I didn’t want anything to do with you –”

“I already thought that,” Daryl says, and he stares down at his shoes, refuses to look at Rick.

“I know,” Rick says, “and that’s my fault, too. I didn’t mean to hurt you, Daryl, I swear I didn’t. I’m not the leader I wanna be, okay? I do what I’m told and I do what’s expected of me. And it wasn’t expected of me to go off to college and fall in love with a _boy_ and I was _scared_. And then Shane found us together and he went and told everyone and I thought my life was over, Daryl. I thought he’d go tell my parents and I was disgusted with myself because y’know, it doesn’t matter that the world’s moved on, there’re still people that don’t think it’s right and I thought I should think that, too, and I just… I’m not explaining myself very well, I’m sorry.”

“I knew you were scared,” Daryl tells him, and his heart is starting to ache all over again, worse than before. “I mean… fuck, I was so mad so maybe I ignored that you were scared and ignored that you had to figure things out. But you made me walk outta there alone, Rick, and you can’t imagine how that felt. And then you started trying to defend Shane to me, and I’ve been so _angry_ at him. I tried not to be but anger is easier and I was just so mad at him. At you for acting like he was some fragile little flower that didn’t know what he was doing.”

“No,” Rick says. “He did, and you’re right, I shouldn’t have been tryin’ to defend him like that to you without explaining why. It’s just… Daryl, he was scared, too. You know how guys like him get. They see a weakness in themselves and they gotta expose it in someone else to make themselves feel better.”

His voice is firm and there's something meaningful there, and it takes Daryl a minute to turn the words over in his head, for it to click. And when it does, he finally looks up at Rick, eyes wide. The rain drenching him is warm now, but a chill goes down his spine. “Are you telling me – Shane is –?”

“He told me the day after that he’s been in love with me since we were kids. And I always thought I was straight so he was never gonna get what he wanted and even if I wasn’t… he’s like my brother, I don’t think of him that way. And then I met you and I started to realise things about myself, that I was falling in love with you despite my own misgivings, and that’s why he didn’t like you. Why he’d make jokes when I was with you. Because he knew now that I wasn’t what I thought, and that you were… that we were…”

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Daryl says, quietly. “And I punched him in the face.”

Rick laughs a little. He steps closer again and Daryl lets him. “Well, I mean, he did deserve it. But he saw everyone was starting to make jokes about me and you after he shouted about us and he admitted he was gay, too, couple of days later. Just so they’d all shut up. He was trying in his own way to make it right. And if there’s one person you don’t fuck with, it’s Shane. So y’know, someone like Shane tells that kind of truth and there’s not a damn person in that house that woulda said anything more about me and certainly not about him if they wanted all their teeth still inside their skull.”

“And that’s why you were defending him to me. ‘Cause he defended you.”

“Yeah,” Rick says. “I know you couldn’t have known that or seen it that way, I’m not blamin’ you, Daryl. And I know I fucked up even more when I told you I didn’t wanna see you. I was scared that being with you would just make it more obvious to me how I was feeling and I was in way more denial than I thought I was. So much fucking denial. I’m so sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” Daryl says. “I didn’t want it to go like this and I should’ve listened when you tried to apologise.”

Rick waves off his apology. “There’s been a lot of miscommunication and I don’t blame you for not wanting to listen to me or talk to me after the shit I pulled and I know it’s real convenient of me _now_ to say it, but… m’not scared anymore, Daryl. And look, I sure as _hell_ don’t blame you if you want nothing to do with me now. But you were alone and I was up all night thinking about you and I drove back here because I needed to get all this out and explain myself. I couldn’t live with this fucking rift between us anymore. And I didn’t want you to be alone on a holiday where you should be with people. I don’t want you to ever be alone again, not when I can be there for you and be with you and… and love you.”

“Love me,” Daryl says, and for a second, he doesn’t think Rick can hear him over the rain, so he asks, louder, “You love me?”

“Yeah,” Rick replies. “And if you don’t want me anymore, I get it. I mean, like I said, I know I fucked up and I know I hurt you and I know that I made you feel like we weren’t –”

“Christ, Rick, shut _up_ ,” Daryl mutters, and he takes two quick steps, slams his body into Rick’s, and kisses him so hard he sees _stars_. Rick stumbles off balance and drops his umbrella, but Daryl catches him, and they stand there, some kind of bullshit cliché in the rain, and Daryl kisses Rick with enough purpose as to be clear that Rick’s always been what he wanted. That no matter how he tried, he couldn’t ever stop wanting him or loving him. The rest of his anger, his sadness, his own guilt seeps away and he feels lighter than he has in so long.

All the pieces are finally in place and things makes sense. It doesn’t really matter anymore whether he should have listened to Rick when Rick finally understood what he’d done and tried to apologise, if he should have made a better effort to listen when Rick tried to explain, if he couldn’t see past his own hurt to see anybody else’s. They’ll go over it more later, maybe, but it’s in the past and this… this is his future. When Rick kisses him back, holds him so tight he can barely breathe and just _kisses_ him, Daryl can see a hundred more just like it, just over the horizon of this embrace, just past every tomorrow.

He doesn’t stop kissing Rick until they’re both starting to shiver. Daryl grabs his hand and the dropped umbrella, pulling Rick toward the door. “C’mon. Inside.”

“Just a second, I need my bag.”

Rick grabs a bag from the front seat and locks up, and Daryl smiles at him and god, it feels good just to be smiling at him again. “You knew I was gonna let you stay, huh?”  
  
“Was hoping,” Rick says, entwining his fingers with Daryl’s and letting him lead him inside. “You love me, remember? Figured all I had to do was get you to listen.”

They step inside and Daryl stops, pulls Rick around and kisses him again. “I’m sorry I wasn’t listening before. I’ll work on listening.”

“Okay,” Rick says. “I’ll work on my feelings about being gay as fuck.”

Daryl laughs, loses himself in a long, slow kiss with Rick. And after that, it’s a long, slow walk up to Daryl’s room, mostly because Rick keeps pausing a step below Daryl and grabbing him, leaning up to kiss him, as if he’s afraid Daryl being turned away from him at any given moment could spell disaster. But it couldn’t possibly, not anymore, because everything is finally okay again.

The kissing doesn’t end when they reach Daryl’s room. They kick off their shoes, Rick drops his bag, and they find their way toward Daryl’s bed. Kissing Rick is pretty high on Daryl’s list of perfect things, and maybe someday when Rick needs an ego boost, he’ll tell him that it’s better than riding his bike, that the way Rick tangles his fingers into Daryl’s hair and kisses him like he’s dying and the only air he’ll ever get is from Daryl’s lungs makes Daryl feel more alive than he’s ever felt.

But more than that, Daryl wants to pick up where they left off. Rick’s body pressed against his is an insistent reminder of a moment when they were seconds away from something he very desperately wants to experience. And even if Rick wasn’t already hard (because Daryl can definitely feel that), even if he wasn’t pawing at Daryl the way he is, the rain is a damn good excuse to slide Rick’s letterman jacket down over his shoulders, to start unbuttoning each button of his shirt, one by one.

Rick smells like soap and cologne, and when his shirt comes off, when Daryl finally gets a look at him, he drinks in every fucking inch. Soft pale skin, an incredible physique that Daryl’s fingers are itching to explore, the barest amount of hair across his chest that turns Daryl on more than he thought possible. “Jesus _Christ_ ,” he whispers. He reaches up to touch and pauses but Rick takes one hand and lays it on his chest, across his heart. Daryl can feel his heart beating, steady and hard under his palm, and both hands are on Rick then, roaming across his chest, along his stomach, coming to rest down on his hips.

Rick leans in, kisses him again, tongue swiping across Daryl’s bottom lip and teasing its way into his mouth, into the most intimate kiss Daryl thinks he’s ever had in his entire life, including the last several dozen he’s shared with Rick in the last twenty minutes.

He groans low in his throat, eyes only opening when Rick pulls away, hands at the hem of Daryl’s shirt, tugging gently. Daryl hesitates briefly, catches Rick’s hands in his own trembling ones, meeting his eyes. Rick’s eyes are all deep blue want, seeking permission for what Daryl has never allowed anyone. But Daryl is sure without doubt that Rick will understand more than most, because he knows what Daryl has been through. So he gives him a short nod, lets go of his hands, and Rick’s fingers curl around the edge of his hoodie and his shirt. He pulls them up together, over his head, drops them to the floor.

Daryl doesn’t know if he expects Rick’s eyes to go wide, if he expects a shocked gasp, but he receives neither. Instead, Rick’s fingers run over old scars gently, trace across them slow and careful before he presses his mouth along the ones that he can see, kisses all the way up to Daryl’s neck, his ear, where he whispers, “You’re perfect.” And there is no healing these wounds because the person who gave them is unremorseful, but it feels good to have Rick’s acceptance, to know that he neither pities Daryl so tremendously that he won’t touch him, nor sees them as marring him in some way. His touch, his words – they take the vulnerability from the moment, lend him a certain kind of strength that he recognises as his own, even if it’s taken Rick to help him find it.

Rick’s fingers push dirty blond hair away from Daryl’s eyes, and he kisses up along his temple, across his forehead and back down across his cheek. He presses them together, chest-to-chest, holds Daryl close as he can and murmurs, “Fuck, I am so in love with you.”

Daryl buries his face against Rick’s neck, presses a kiss of his own there. “I’ve wanted you for so long,” Daryl whispers, and he’s aware that’s not really the proper response to being told Rick is in love with him, but he’s rapidly losing the ability to find words deeper than that.

Rick pulls back to look at him and smiles. “I’m yours now.”

From there, Daryl would be hard pressed to recount later every moment that leads them to being in his bed. He doesn’t know whose jeans come off first; he only knows that he stands with his mouth open for what feels like several minutes when he sees Rick entirely naked, hard, wanting him. Only knows that Rick does much the same with him, says something along the lines of “Fucking hell, never told me you were packing _that_ ,” and Daryl would have found the good sense to laugh if Rick hadn’t pressed up against him, pushed him down into the bed and ground his hips against him.

It’s better than before, though, Daryl can say that for sure. The friction is more immediate, more intense, and he’s already leaking way too much precome for him to believe this is going to last long. It’s the unbelievably exquisite and contrasting sensations of enough heat to call it a fire, of their skin pressed together, still damp and cool from the rain. And better than that, even, is when Rick sits back on his heels, pulls Daryl up onto his knees, kisses him and wraps one firm hand around him, stroking hard and rough and fast.

Daryl’s mind goes blank, barely manages to process the action of doing the same for Rick, the instinctive motion of getting him off the way he does himself. He’s lost in the kiss, lost in the way Rick is moaning, bucking his hips against Daryl’s palm while Daryl thrusts against his. And he’s sure right now he should be memorising every second of this, of this first time of many, even if it’s shaky handjobs and not actual sex (he’s sure that’s to come). But he can’t, because there’s a clock ticking down inside him now, a clock or a timebomb, maybe, and he’s a half second from bursting into pieces.

He feels his mouth move under Rick’s, forming words, mumbling into their kiss – maybe a warning, or a declaration of some kind, as if orgasm is the kind of thing you’re definitely supposed to declare the way one might announce themselves upon entering a room. And this is an arrival of some sort, he thinks. He doesn’t even know what he says, only feels the way his back arches, the way the bowing of his spine forces his chest harder against Rick’s, the way he feels a warm rush of ecstasy… the way he comes all over Rick’s hand, down Rick’s thigh, the way he rocks into Rick’s fist over and over and over until he can’t take it anymore, until the intensity of it passes and he has to pull away because it’s like sensory overload.

Rick follows him by mere seconds, and Daryl regains enough sense of self to get Rick off, to stroke him through it. It’s been a good long while since he’s touched another boy like this, and even then, it was only ever one. He’s no expert, but the low, animal growl in Rick’s throat, the thrust of his hips, say he’s doing a damn good job. It makes his own cock twitch helplessly, because god, that’s so fucking _hot_. Watching Rick finally fall over that edge and being responsible for it is making Daryl’s head spin.

He drops backward onto the bed and, because he’s curious, sucks at one of his fingers, still covered in Rick’s come. It’s the first time he’s ever done that and far be it from the horrible taste so many people claim, it’s actually kind of nice. Rick watches him and groans, collapsing next to him. “Shit,” he mutters. “That’s… fuck.”

Daryl laughs weakly, collects a handful of tissues from the box on his desk and hands half of them to Rick. It’s shitty for a cleanup job, but it’ll have to do for now, because Daryl’s legs are far too weak to even consider going for the bathroom.

Rick pulls him close after that, wraps both arms around him and holds him like he never intends to let go again. Daryl revels in it. The first day of freshman year, when he ran into Rick  handing out fliers advertising rush week for his fraternity, he’d imagined what it’d be like to be in those arms. They hadn’t known each other then, but Rick had flashed him a brief smile, and Daryl had been a goner. And now he’s here, Rick beside him, holding him, still reeling from the fierceness of their kissing, of the best orgasm he’s ever had in his whole damn life.

It’s a long while before Rick speaks, and when he does, he sounds sleepy. “I was prepared to stay in the parking lot the whole break if you didn’t come out,” he admits.

Daryl presses his face against Rick’s chest and laughs. “Yeah? What were you gonna survive on, granola bars and water?”

Rick shrugs. “I woulda made some runs to McDonald’s, maybe. But I was gonna stay until you talked to me.”  
  
Daryl noses into his skin, presses a kiss against Rick’s collarbone. “I’m glad I came out.”

Rick chuckles. “I’m glad I came out too, I guess.”

They both laugh, and Daryl strokes his fingers along Rick’s side. “Seriously, I’m so sorry, Rick. I’m so sorry that I couldn’t get past my own shit to see you were struggling, too.”

Rick runs his fingers through Daryl’s hair. “It’s okay. I didn’t exactly make it easy for you to do that. I’m sorry that I made you walk outta there alone. I know what you’ve been through in your life, Daryl. That was a seriously shitty thing of me to do.”

“I forgive you,” Daryl tells him. “You were right, there’s been a lot of miscommunication.”

“And I forgive you. No more of that, yeah? From now on it’s you and me and we work through all of this together. This is new to me and I know a lot of this is new to you. So I think the solution is that we spend so much time together that there’s no more fear, just you and me and preferably the nearest private place so I can just kiss you all the fucking time. God, I love kissing you.”

Daryl smiles up at him, kisses his jaw. “I agree. Just you ‘n’ me.” Rick holds him tighter, and Daryl settles his head into the space between Rick’s neck and shoulder.

“Should sleep,” Rick says. “M’tired. Drove all morning. Would’ve driven a million miles for you, though.”

“Good to know,” Daryl murmurs. “Go to sleep. I’m not goin’ anywhere. I’ll be right here when you wake up.”  
  
“Better be,” Rick replies through a yawn. “I love you and I’m not lettin’ you go again.”

Daryl doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of hearing that.

“I love you,” he tells Rick. “I love you.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ladies and gentleman, the moment you've been waiting for. ;)

Daryl doesn’t remember the last time he’s slept until three in the afternoon, but it’s easier to sleep when his chest is not tight with tension, when his heart is not caving in, when his mind is not so clouded with worry. And then there’s sleeping next to someone else, in someone’s arms; Daryl’s never done that before, but he likes it. It’s nice – more than nice – to have Rick’s body against his, naked and warm and breathing deep. To have him curled against him, one hand resting on Daryl’s stomach, to feel every inch of Rick aligned with every inch of himself, fitting him like a puzzle piece.

Daryl doesn’t want to move, but he’s desperate for a piss and to stretch his body out and he tries to do it without waking Rick up. Slowly, he slips out from under Rick’s arm, replacing it gently in his vacated spot. The floor is cold under his feet and he shivers, reaching toward his desk chair where a pair of PJ bottoms hang over the back of it, worn and thin, but warm flannel. He makes his way to the door on the other side of the room, grateful that his suitemates are gone for break and he can just slip in and out without worrying he’ll have to see or talk to them.

When he returns to the room, he finds Rick awake and waiting for him. “Sorry,” Daryl says. “Was supposed to be right here when you woke up, huh?”

“Mm,” Rick says, yawning. “missed you terribly.”

“I bet,” Daryl laughs, moving back toward the bed. Rick pulls aside the blanket and reaches for Daryl’s hand, watching him for just a moment before drawing him back down into the bed and covering them up.

“You okay?” Daryl asks, snuggling back into him.

“Yeah. I just like seeing you like this, y’know, when you first wake up. Those moments are when you really get to see someone. Learn things.”

“Oh?” Daryl says. “And what’d you learn?”

Rick hums thoughtfully, kisses the back of Daryl’s neck and murmurs against his skin, “That I want you. So bad.”

“You got me,” Daryl says.

Rick laughs, and Daryl feels the vibrations of it against his jaw, Rick’s lips planting warm kisses against his skin. “I know,” Rick says. His mouth finds Daryl’s ear and he whispers, “But that’s not what I meant.”

And it occurs to Daryl pretty quickly exactly what he means when Rick presses against him, rocks his hips against his ass, and Daryl feels exactly how hard he already is.

“ _Oh_ ,” Daryl murmurs, and he’s pretty sure the noise that comes from him is completely pitiful. Rick’s hand, resting back on his stomach, slides slowly downward until his fingers tease their way inside Daryl’s PJ bottoms and close firmly around his cock.

Daryl gasps, his breath catching in his throat. He wonders if he’ll ever get used to the way Rick’s hands feel on him, the way they feel between his legs, because Jesus Christ, it’s so good. Good enough to get addicted to like a drug. He can’t speak himself to any kind of drug use, but he remembers the way Merle has looked when he’s been strung out on half a dozen different things. Like he’s floating away on a cloud inside the eye of a vicious storm, subtle lethargy mixed with a jolt of electricity, enough to keep you seeking after something that satisfies but is never quite enough.

And that’s how Daryl feels about this. He’s never going to get enough of Rick’s touch, not with the endless well of need deep in the pit of his belly, the one that makes all his muscles tense so pleasurably with Rick’s hands on him. Now that the brunt of his anger has been locked away again, there’s some other creature stirring in him, some animal thing that screams for what it wants and doesn’t shut up until it’s sated, until Daryl climbs high enough, reaches a peak, and tumbles all the way back down. And Daryl’s body plays chemist, mixes his need for Rick with his love for him, then puts him over a flame and waits to see what’ll happen.

And what happens is Daryl pulls Rick’s hand away long enough to roll over, wriggling out of his PJ bottoms with some kind of expertise he didn’t know he had, and kisses him hard enough to bruise. Rick moans Daryl’s name against his mouth, and god, Daryl could get used to the way Rick sounds when he’s aroused, all deep, throaty voice and a certain purr in his tone that just makes Daryl’s skin break out in goosebumps. He climbs half on top of Rick, presses his face against Rick’s unshaven jaw and rubs against rough stubble, mostly because it’s hard to look him in the eye when he whispers, “I want you to fuck me.”

Rick’s fingers trail down Daryl’s spine until one hand is on his ass, and Daryl can’t help but roll his hips obscenely against Rick’s thigh, eager for a little friction, suddenly feeling embarrassingly desperate. Because there’s handjobs and kissing Rick and being in his arms, but Daryl would be a liar if he pretended he hasn’t also thought about this a hundred thousand times, how it’ll feel to have Rick inside him.

“I want that too,” Rick says, and he manoeuvers them over until he’s on top, reaching down to the floor for his bag, coming up with a box of condoms and a bottle of lube, setting them on the desk.

Daryl has to laugh. “Big plans?” he asks, and he moans when Rick curls a hand around his cock again, all tease and no real pressure, not enough to come close to getting him off.

Rick grins sheepishly. “Might’ve, um… stopped by CVS before I came here.”

Daryl pulls him down into a kiss. “Forward thinking. I like it.”

Rick pulls back after a moment, then slides his fingers in between Daryl’s and holds his hands. “I don’t really know what I’m doing here, so…” He sighs and frowns. “Fuck. I want this to be good for you.”

“Ain’t that different from any other kinda sex, Rick,” Daryl promises.

Rick rubs a hand across his face and cringes, shuts his eyes for a moment, a pink flush coming over his cheeks. “I, uh. I haven’t done that as much as you probably think I have,” Rick says. “I’ve slept with like, two girls in my entire life and frankly, neither of them were that recent and it’s not like… I’m not an expert at this.”

Daryl presses their palms together and smiles. “You think I am? I’ve been with one dude, Rick, it’s not like I’m some sorta gay sex guru or somethin’.”

Rick snorts out a laugh, leaning down and pressing his forehead against Daryl’s. “So we’re kinda screwed then, huh?”

“Think it’s me who’ll be screwed,” Daryl says with a smirk, pressing a kiss to the corner of Rick’s mouth. “Look, it’ll be good no matter what. No world in which this is not the best damn experience of my entire life. Okay?”

“Okay,” Rick agrees, drawing him into a real kiss and thrusting against Daryl, his cock hard against Daryl’s own and there’s still no word that comes close to describing that, the way it feels, the way it makes Daryl want to lie there all day and just do that and nothing else. But that’s not the idea here and there’ll be another day for that, another _thousand_ lazy days for that.

Rick releases Daryl’s hands, starts kissing and sucking at his neck, across his chest, down his stomach until he gets to Daryl’s cock and it’s only then that Daryl realises what he’s about to do.

“Jesus, Rick, you don’t have to – ” he starts, but Rick cuts him off by taking him into his mouth, and holy shit, it’s warm and wet and _good_ and Daryl has to fight to keep his hips firmly against the mattress, to not fuck into Rick’s mouth like he wants to and _god,_ he wants to. Daryl thinks there might be something instinctive in doing a thing the way you’d want it done to you, but Rick’s better at this than he could’ve dreamt.

So when he pulls back, looks up at Daryl and mumbles, “Not sure I’m doing this right,” Daryl shakes his head back and forth rapidly.

“Oh no, you’re doin’ it right. Fucking _hell_ , Rick.” And Daryl tries to get more words out, to reiterate that he doesn’t have to do this, that they literally just had a conversation about how Rick is new to all of this, but Rick doesn’t give him the chance. He goes back to it and Daryl’s fingers tangle into his curls, pushing his hips up slow and careful, trying hard as he can to restrain himself.

He closes his eyes, digs his head back into the pillow, and reminds himself that he is not fucking fourteen anymore, that there’s no world in which he’s going to come this fast, but that warm feeling is blossoming in his belly, along his spine and he’s going to have to stop Rick soon before it’s all over way too quick.

“Oh my _god,_ ” Daryl whimpers, tugging at Rick’s hair, muscles tensing, and god, the feeling of Rick’s tongue flicking across his slit is almost unbearable. He sucks at the head before taking as much as he can and then pulling away at Daryl’s insistence, leaving him damn near throbbing. His hands drop to the bed, still trembling and he smiles too wide when he says, “You’re way too good at that.”

Rick shrugs as if it’s no big deal before he admits, “There might have been some, um. Porn watching. Of the not straight kind. The last couple of weeks.”

Daryl looks at him, wide-eyed. “ _Weeks_?”

Rick blushes. “It was a way for me to try and, I dunno, explore some things I was feeling, I guess. ‘Cause if I didn’t I think I would’ve kissed you about three days after we first started that project based solely on the fact that you were hot and I didn’t think that was a good idea.”

Daryl glares at him. “That would have been the best idea you’d ever had. Ever.”

Rick laughs and crawls up to kiss him and Daryl can taste himself on Rick’s tongue and he doesn’t think anything’s ever been hotter than that. “Mm, but I probably woulda fucked the whole thing up a lot sooner,” Rick says between kisses, “and then we never woulda gotten anywhere ‘cause we wouldn’t have known anything about each other and we wouldn’t know what we were missing.”

Daryl concedes that he’s probably right, and traces patterns along Rick’s back. “I _have_ missed you,” he says.

“Me too,” Rick replies, “but I think we’re making up for that now, huh?”

“Oh, _so_ much,” Daryl says. “And I don’t wanna wait anymore.” He reaches over for the supplies on his desk and holds them out to Rick.

“Impatient, are you?” Rick says, grinning.

“Very.”

Rick sits up briefly, straddling Daryl’s thighs, taking the box and bottle from him. Daryl doesn’t hesitate to push up against his ass, to reach one hand out and stroke Rick torturously slowly so that he fumbles with opening the box of condoms. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters, and Daryl laughs.

“Somethin’ I can help you with?”

“Little shit,” Rick says, and Daryl grins innocently. He finally gets the box open and pulls a condom free, dropping it onto Daryl’s chest. “Since you’re so intent on touching me, how ‘bout you put that on for me?”

Daryl shivers, because holy shit, that’s _hot_ , and he complies so fast that he has to remind himself to keep the neediness in check because he’s not sure showing how badly he wants Rick inside him right now is going to lend itself well to this first time – this first time for Rick, for _them_. He doesn’t want there to be some kind of pressure on Rick because he doesn’t feel there should be. Like he told him, no matter what, it’s going to be good, the best thing in his whole damn life.

Rick spreads lube over his cock and moves down between Daryl’s thighs, nudging them apart and holding up the bottle. “Should I, um…?” He hesitates and Daryl nods.

“Yeah, a little. Or I can do it, if you don’t wanna –”

“Oh, no, I’m so doing that,” Rick says, and his eyes are all desire, crystal blue growing hazy with it.

He’s gentle with Daryl, fingers only pressing lightly at first, slick with lube and stroking, rubbing, massaging. And then Rick starts to push one inside, slow and careful and Daryl tries to relax even though his entire body is tensing up with both pleasure and just a hint of pain he’s grown unused to because he hasn’t done this, not even to himself, in a fairly long time.

For Rick, it’s clearly incredible, because even as he works one finger inside Daryl, he’s staring at Daryl’s face with a mixture of something that looks like disbelief, maybe even envy… but that part could be Daryl’s imagination. “Oh my god,” Rick murmurs, “that’s… fuck…” He trails off but his eyes don’t leave Daryl’s, and Daryl has to close his eyes because for a second, he’s afraid of the intimacy of this act alone. But he opens them again a moment later, reminds himself that he’s not the only one who might be a little afraid here, even as Rick gives one small thrust, hums out a moan himself as if he’s the one who’s feeling this.

“Holy shit,” Daryl gasps, and he’s forgotten even this much fullness, and even though it feels intrusive, it also feels good, like hunger being satisfied. Of course, this too is hunger of a kind, and Daryl realises he’s been feeling that way not just for the weeks that he’s been growing close to Rick, but for the year he’s spent pining after him. He’s felt that way all the times he would go back to his dorm freshman year and find his roommate out, slip under the covers and hastily get himself off, one hand on his dick, the other reaching around to fuck himself while he imagined it was Rick instead.

There’ll be time to tell him all this later, Daryl thinks. For the moment, he settles into a place of enjoying every single little sensation he’s currently feeling with Rick now slowly pulling away and pushing back in, opening Daryl up for him – for _him_ – and fuck if that’s not the greatest thought in the universe.

It’s that thought that makes Daryl ask for more (although to his own ears it sounds pitifully like begging), and Rick obliges him, works a second finger in beside the first in a way that makes Daryl’s eyes roll back and his toes curl and if it’s this nice now… well, he’s unwilling to imagine how good it’s about to get, because he’s not quite sure that alone won’t make him implode.

It doesn’t take Daryl long to succumb to his own desperation, to reach down and still Rick’s hand. “O-okay, okay,” he stutters out, swallowing and trying again. “Please, Rick, _need_ you.”

“Yeah,” Rick mutters, snapping out of whatever reverie he was briefly lost in, and pulling his fingers free of Daryl. There’s an immediate sense of some kind of loss, and even though it’s physical, it feels emotional, too. And Daryl tries not to think about it too hard, about the actual emotion surrounding this thing they’re doing, this thing that’s fucking but something else, too, something deeper – even if Daryl wants to scrunch up his nose and make a face at the word _lovemaking_ because ugh, gross. But he’s afraid if he thinks about it all too much, about how perfect this one moment is, then he’ll do something dumb and ridiculous like cry or call Rick some weird pet name and really, is this what being in love is like?

Daryl frowns at his own idiocy and Rick, a half second from pressing the head of his cock against Daryl’s entrance, pulls away. “Is this… are you okay?” he asks. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… fuck, did I hurt you?”

And Daryl pulls him down into his arms, pushes his face against Rick’s neck. “No,” he promises. “Just thinking too much about how much I want this and want you and fuck, Rick, I love you.”

Rick laughs a little, pulls back and kisses Daryl’s mouth. “I love you,” he says. “Stop thinking so much, gorgeous. Be here.”

And before Daryl has time to really consider the fact that Rick just called him _gorgeous_ , he’s reaching down and, with his mouth back on Daryl’s, guiding himself just the barest inch inside.

Daryl opens his mouth, maybe to curse or shout Rick’s name, but all that comes out is a moan. Rick goes slow, slower than he needs to, but enough to make it obvious that he’s trying to make sure he doesn’t hurt Daryl. But it’s anything but painful. Daryl thinks that maybe it might be if his mind weren’t spinning in a thousand different directions like the spokes of a wheel, one direction focused on how this is actually _happening_ , another on how it’s actually happening with _Rick_ , a third on the fact that this is so much better than Rick’s fingers alone. Everything stops being linear, deviates into something else, dissolves into a muddled mess of _yes_ and _good_ and _more_ and _please_ , and Daryl’s not even sure if he’s thinking those things or saying them out loud.

Rick, eyes shut tight, forehead pressed against Daryl’s, makes a sound low in his throat that sounds like a growl, bites his lip to hold it back as if he’s not allowed to make a sound but that doesn’t last long. There’s a moment, a half second of white noise in Daryl’s ears and he’d think it a bloodrush to the head if it didn’t seem like all the blood in his body were currently somewhere else, and then Rick slides all the way inside him, moans so loud that Daryl can feel it like hard vibrations in his eardrums. 

“Jesus Christ, Daryl,” Rick gasps, and his voice is already wrecked, lust-drenched and raspy, and Daryl doesn’t think he should feel this close already when Rick hasn’t even moved. Rick lift his head, hand moving toward Daryl’s cock, but Daryl pushes it away, shakes his own head and laughs shakily.

“Wouldn’t do that,” he mumbles. “You’re gonna make me come.”

“Thought that was the goal,” Rick whispers, and his hips are stilled but shaking.

“Wanna come with you fucking me.”

Rick groans, dropping his head forward onto the pillow next to Daryl’s. “Won’t get to, you keep saying stuff like that.”

“C’mon then,” Daryl says, lifts his legs up enough to lock them around Rick’s waist, and even that subtle shift feels like heaven. “Need you to, c’mon.”

It’s slow at first, Rick pulling halfway out and pushing back in, slow and as steady as he can manage, mouth falling open on one moan after the next, and at one point, Daryl thinks he utters the word _tight_ and he chooses not to acknowledge that because holy _fuck_. But slow lasts a minute, two at most, because Daryl threads his fingers into Rick’s hair, pulls him in for more kisses, urges him on with insensible, incoherent words against his lips, and Rick picks up the pace.

Daryl rocks his hips up into him, savouring the warmth of Rick pressed against him, the heat of him burying himself so fucking deep that Daryl thinks there’s fucking and then whatever _this_ is. Whatever Rick is doing to him right now that is hitting something in him just the right way, the _perfect_ way, that he can barely breathe and he’s fighting to keep himself back from an edge that he’s already riding, so close to coming that he’s frankly surprised he already hasn’t. He knew this wouldn’t last long but this is almost embarrassingly short and he’d probably _feel_ embarrassed if he could feel anything not revolving around Rick.

A keening whine forces itself out of his throat, one hand curling into the sheets, the other clutching at the edge of the bed, gripping tight enough to hurt as if that will help at all. “Fuck, Rick, that’s so good, please, fuck, _please_ !” He doesn’t even know what he’s pleading for at this point, only that he’s desperate for _something_ , that he’s harder than fucking diamonds and there’s precome all over his belly, that Rick’s reaching between them and spreading it down around the head of his cock, using it to stroke him off in time with his thrusts.

“Oh, Jesus _fuck_ \- Rick!” And Daryl wants to hold onto this feeling all night, wants to settle into the rhythm they’re in now and stay there, wants to feel that spark racing through him forever, but he’s too close now.

He tries to get out a warning, but Rick brushes his lips across Daryl’s, just like the first time, and drawls in his ear, “So perfect, Daryl, love you.” He bites at Daryl’s shoulder and thrusts into him so damn deep that Daryl feels it everywhere, and Daryl comes so fast and hard that it feels like disappearing into another fucking dimension. He can feel the way his whole body shudders with it, back arching up sharply, Rick’s hand working him through it, still thrusting into him and Daryl tries to shut up but all he can do is moan, crying out Rick’s name over and over and not really caring if the whole fucking state of Georgia hears him.

Rick’s hips snap forward one last time and he comes, too, and Daryl fights to keep his eyes from closing, watches the look on Rick’s face and oh god, he’s beautiful. That’s the only word Daryl can come up with that works, that makes sense, because Rick is so fucking flawless, even like this, _especially_ like this, mouth open on a desperate, breathless gasp, body taut and tense and straining.

It’s over as quick as it began, but Daryl doesn’t care very much. Rick all but collapses against him, both of them fighting for air, Rick still inside him, and all he cares about is that he doesn’t wake up and find this whole day was a dream. He reaches down, pinches his own thigh hard, convinces himself of the reality of all of this, of Rick lying on top of him, face in the crook of Daryl’s neck and shoulder, body still twitching.

It’s a few slow minutes before anyone speaks, and Daryl is hesitant to let Rick go, to move his legs and let Rick pull free of him, because this… just this, this connection, both physical and emotional, is making him so fucking happy that he doesn’t want it to end yet. So he apologises, huffing out a small laugh and murmuring, “Sorry, just… don’t move. Not yet.”

“Don’t worry,” Rick tells him, voice muffled against his skin. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Good.”

Daryl curls his arms around Rick’s back and just holds onto him, revels in the deep sense of satisfaction, of peace in him. “Maybe this’ll last longer next time,” he whispers after a long time, and Rick’s shoulders shake with laughter.

He lifts his head up to look at Daryl. “Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe you’ll be just as easily overwhelmed by fucking me as I was you.”

Daryl feels himself flush. “You… you want me to?”

“Mm.” Rick nods and presses his forehead against Daryl’s again, closing his eyes. “Gimme ten minutes, I’ll be good to go.”

Daryl snorts out a laugh. “You’re full of it,” he says and lets his eyes fall closed, too, tipping his head up to kiss Rick.

“I love you,” Rick says again, and Daryl will never tire of hearing it.

“I love you back.”

Daryl’s not sure how long they lie there like that, just breathing in sync, breathing in each other, Rick inside Daryl and Daryl holding tight to him as if he will disappear without Daryl’s hands on him. But if there’s one thing Daryl thinks he can really be sure of, it’s that Rick is not going to disappear again. It’s the first time Daryl’s been able to imagine a future for himself past a graduation date, and all he knows is that he wants Rick to be in it.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for taking ages to get this week's chapter up. I think maybe I'm feeling a little bittersweet about coming close to the end so I'm taking my sweet ass time with it. Hope you guys enjoy it! (:

Daryl wakes early on Thanksgiving morning to his phone buzzing on the desk. He snatches it quickly, hoping not to wake Rick for a while and just let him sleep, but he stirs anyway, rolls into Daryl’s side and buries his face against his shoulder.

“Whassat?” he mumbles, and Daryl reaches over, runs his fingers through Rick’s curls.

“Just my brother,” he says, swiping up the screen to read through a series of texts from Merle. It’s the usual “sorry I’m not around, take care of yourself baby bro” text that Daryl gets now and then, on holidays mostly. Daryl swallows a sudden sense of misery and puts the phone aside, bitterly thinking that he’s surprised Merle’s even lucid enough to remember the date.

Rick’s eyes are barely open, but he looks up at Daryl with worry. “Everything okay?” he asks, mouth stretching wide in a yawn.

“Same old,” Daryl mutters, and before he can stop himself, he starts to ramble. “I stay here as much as I can, but we travel in the summer, y’know? S’all we do. We don’t really got a place to go anymore, so it’s Merle’s truck and my bike and shitty motel rooms and I don’t see him often until he comes to pick me up in May. And I mean, don’t get me wrong. He does his best, I guess. But his life is drugs and hookers so it’s not a lot of fun.”

Rick is certainly awake then, more alert, as if being let further into Daryl’s world right then is something he didn’t expect. He pushes himself up in the bed a little more so his head is level with Daryl’s on the pillow, wraps one arm around him and kisses his cheek. “I’m sorry, Daryl. I know I can’t make it better, but you got me now and I’m gonna try my best to give you whatever you need. You probably don’t really believe in promises anymore but whatever it’s worth, I promise I’ll be here for you.”

And Rick is right – Daryl doesn’t put much stock in promises, but if there’s one thing all this has shown him, it’s that Rick is an intensely loyal person. He’d tried to be loyal to Shane and Daryl all at once and it had proved a struggle, but now they’re here. They’ve moved past it and will continue to.

“Thank you,” Daryl tells him, because he doesn’t know what else to say, even if that doesn’t quite express the depths of his gratitude for Rick. On a day of being thankful, Daryl is feeling even more extraordinarily grateful for him.

“You’re good,” Rick goes on, after a moment. His voice is still sleepy but his words are firm, and he’s clearly intent on saying whatever is on his mind.

So Daryl asks, “At what?”  
  
“At a lot of things, but I mean, you’re _good_. You’re a good person. The best kind of person. Everything you’ve been through and you turned out so good, Daryl. I know you got a lot of anger still, I’m not blind. But getting to know you… I think I’m starting to learn that you worry about that kind of thing or the person you are or are gonna be and I just wanna tell you that you’re good.” Rick frowns, as if he’s unsure if he’s crossing some kind of line, but he pushes on anyway. “I don’t mean to sound like a condescending asshole or something, but people in your position don’t always turn out this way, you know? It’s easier for them to swim down but you don’t do that and you’re honestly the best person I know and the kindest and even when I put you through hell and you had every right to tell me to fuck off for the rest of my life, you still let me back in and I think it says a lot about you.” 

Daryl looks at Rick, a little bit stunned, and a lot uncertain of what to say. So he kisses him instead and just whispers, “I love you,” over and over against his lips. Because Rick is not wrong. Daryl is angry still, and it always burns somewhere inside, but he fights it like hell because he doesn’t want it to rule him. If he lets it, then he is no better a man than his father who put his anger into a belt or a fist and let it beat its way into his sons.

Daryl spends a lot of time thinking about what he’s going to do and say before he does or says it, and Rick has seen moments where Daryl doesn’t think it through, where he uses words like weapons, and he knows it isn’t pretty. And so Rick knows too, maybe better than anyone, that there are too many pieces of Daryl that have only just begun to heal, some that haven’t even started. But he recognises that Daryl is trying, that he is inherently a good person, that – and Daryl believes this to be true – even on his worst days, he doesn’t even begin to approach his father. He is his father’s son but his own man, and Daryl reminds himself all the time that having to grow up this fast does not mean he doesn’t get to make his own choices.

And above everything, aside from all the things Rick is that Daryl loves, the fact that he sees this about Daryl is what makes Daryl love him so fiercely. It’s what made him fall so completely and so fast when he began to learn Rick the same way he learns poetry, the same way he learns every day how to be better, do better. And having Rick makes him _want_ to be better; there’s a deep, abiding desire in him to prove himself worthy. 

Although, the fear of looking like Rick’s charity case is disappearing because Daryl doesn’t think it matters anymore what the hell anyone else thinks. It only matters how the two of them feel, and right in this moment, Daryl is full to bursting with love for this boy whose heart is made of gold, who would go to great lengths and overcome his own fears for someone like Daryl. But then, Daryl thinks, it’s no longer even _someone like Daryl_ , as if people like Daryl are not _worth_ it. It’s just Daryl as himself and Rick’s acceptance, his love, unconditional and all-encompassing. 

Rick and Daryl are jolted back to the present when Rick’s phone starts ringing. Rick groans in frustration and Daryl reaches for his phone beside his own on the desk, handing it over. He looks at the screen and shoots Daryl an apologetic grin. “It’s my Mom.”  
  
Rick answers the call and puts her on speakerphone. “Hi, Mom.” 

Rick’s mom is all southern drawl, even worse than Rick, and Daryl has to put his hand over his mouth to stop himself from laughing. “Hi baby!” Daryl mouths “baby” at Rick and Rick shows him his middle finger. “Happy Thanksgiving!”

“You too, Mom. You cooking dinner yet?”

“Boy, I’ve had this turkey in the oven for an hour already, you know me. But I won’t keep you on the phone, I just wanted to check in with you. You bringin’ that boy of yours around or you stayin’ there, sweetpea?”

Daryl is caught between laughing at Rick’s mom and her pet names for her son and being stunned that apparently she knows all about the two of them.

“We’re gonna stay here,” Rick says. “Daryl’s gonna teach me how to cook.”

Daryl snorts out a laugh at the exact same moment Rick’s mother does. “I pity that boy, that’s a lost cause if ever I heard one. He sticks around and he’s gonna have to take care of you the rest of his life, he knows that, right?”

Rick clears his throat loudly and rambles out, “Okay, I gotta go Mom, love you, bye!” And he barely lets her get out a “love you!” before he hangs up, putting his face in his palm and going pink.

Daryl presses his head against Rick’s shoulder and laughs for a solid minute before regaining his composure. “So you told your mama, huh?”

Rick shrugs. “Didn’t have to tell her much. Apparently, she always thought Shane was overcompensating for something and that he’s so handsome that I was gonna ‘go gay’ and turn up to some family reunion someday with him and announce to ‘em all we were married or whatever. I don’t think she really gets it on some progressive level or anything but she doesn’t seem to care either way, long as I’m happy.”

“Mm. And you’re happy?”

“More than I’ve ever been.”

Daryl kisses his cheek. “You tell her I’m not as handsome as Shane?”

“Yup,” Rick says, grinning. “Told her you were _even_ hotter. She’s eager to meet you now.” 

Daryl shakes his head and captures Rick’s lips in a brief kiss. “Love you. But I ain’t teachin’ you how to cook.” Daryl rolls away and slides out of bed, going for the bathroom. “But hey, you get your ass up and join me in the shower and I _might_ let you stand there and look pretty while _I_ do the cooking.” 

“Oh, thanks!” Rick calls after him. “I’m not useful but at least I’m _pretty_!” 

#  


The one nice thing about living in the dorms, Daryl thinks, is that everywhere you need to be is in your immediate surroundings. But on the other hand, not yet being able to have an apartment of his own means that any time Daryl wants to cook (a lot of the time, because it’s better and healthier than the dining hall), he has to drag everything down to the little kitchen on the ground floor. Today, at least, he has an extra pair of arms to carry everything downstairs, because Daryl has pretty much everything he needs to be able to make a miniature version of a complete Thanksgiving dinner for himself and now for Rick.  
  
“Just put everything on the counter,” Daryl instructs when they get inside the kitchen, the door shutting behind them. Daryl’s glad that whoever else remains in the hall over break hasn’t had the same idea, which means he can take over the oven all he wants. He opens the cupboards and looks for bowls while Rick drops everything onto the counter and hops up onto the table, crossing his legs, clearly intent on watching Daryl work.   
  
But Daryl beckons him over. “Said I wasn’t gonna _teach_ you nothin’, doesn’t mean I don’t need your help.”  
  
Rick frowns. “I thought I was supposed to stand here and look hot, and now you’re putting me to work. Where will the treachery end?”  
  
Daryl laughs and hands him a pot and a recipe for a basting sauce comprised of butter, honey, chili powder and orange juice. “Know you have trouble measuring things,” Daryl says, remembering how Rick overdid the flour with the cookies, “but see if you can manage mixing those together. Keep that on super low heat, I don’t want it to burn.” Rick glares at him but Daryl leans over and pecks him on the lips, adds a _please_ to his request.  
  
Rick rolls his eyes. “Don’t have trouble measuring,” he grumbles.  
  
“Uh huh,” Daryl says, and then adds under his breath, “said your dick was _average_ earlier and my ass is still sore, but nah, you got no trouble measuring.”  
  
Rick cracks up laughing and reaches for a ring of measuring spoons, looking all too smug. Daryl preheats the oven while Rick is busy and starts to work on the Cornish hen, splitting it in half and removing the backbone, placing each half in a baking dish before moving on to peeling potatoes.

“You’re good at this kinda thing,” Rick says, watching Daryl move around the kitchen, reaching into cupboards for things and multi-tasking with the vegetables.  
  
Daryl smiles a little. “I used to cook with my mom when I was a kid,” he says, and even though it makes him sad to think about the fact that he hasn’t been able to cook with her in a long, long time, they’re happy memories. “She used to hate having me underfoot and she’d be yellin’ at me to get out of her kitchen but then she’d turn right around and hand me a bowl and tell me to mix.”  
  
Rick grins. “Oh, so that’s where you get that from.”  
  
“Guilty,” Daryl says, handing off a pot of frozen peas to Rick as if to exemplify this statement. “Enough water to cover ‘em,  and just leave ‘em on the stove for now.”  
  
Rick salutes him and takes the pot, and Daryl returns to chopping up potatoes, tossing them into a third pot and passing them to Rick with similar instructions. He slides the hen into the oven for about ten minutes and when it comes out, asks Rick to hand him the pot with the basting sauce.

It moves swiftly and smoothly from there, almost like a dance, Daryl putting vegetables on to cook and basting the hen every now and then before covering everything and turning to a pre-made pie crust and a bowl of apples.  
  
When Rick sees what he’s going for, he gets excited. “Oh! I can make the pie!” he says confidently, and Daryl whirls around, giving him the evil eye.  
  
“You absolutely _cannot_ make the pie,” Daryl replies emphatically. “You can do harmless things like washin’ and choppin’ up the apples.”  
  
Rick huffs and glares right back. “You _survived_ my cookies, Daryl.”  
  
“Only just barely,” Daryl mumbles under his breath and loops an arm around Rick’s waist as he reluctantly sets the bowl of apples in the sink to wash them. Daryl kisses the back of his neck. “Wash the apples and cut ‘em up and you’ll get a reward.”  
  
Rick turns to look at Daryl, eyes lighting up. “What we talking, Dixon?”  
  
“Well,” Daryl says with a grin, “it involves significantly less clothes than you’re wearin’ now, so best get a move on, I’d say.” This seems agreeable to Rick because he starts washing, peeling and chopping almost faster than Daryl can mix the rest of the ingredients together, and Daryl has to laugh. “Watch your fingers there, you’re gonna need those.”  
  
“I’m sure I will,” Rick says, scooping a second handful of apple chunks into a bowl. “You seemed to like ‘em yesterday. And this morning in the shower was –”   
  
“Focus,” Daryl interrupts. “My ass ain’t going anywhere but seriously, your fingers might if you’re not careful.”  
  
“Aw,” Rick says, smirking. “Looking out for me, huh?”  
  
Daryl rolls his eyes. “What was your mama saying on the phone earlier? Gotta take care of you.”   
  
Rick groans. “I’m never gonna live that down, am I?”   
  
“Not even when you’re ninety.”   
  
Rick hands over the apples when he’s finished and washes his hands while Daryl finishes putting the pie together, turning down the oven and sliding it in beneath the hen. He washes his own hands and turns to Rick, reaching forward and grabbing him by one belt loop, tugging him forward into his arms and into a kiss.  
  
“Already feel rewarded,” Rick murmurs against Daryl’s mouth, and he nips at Daryl’s bottom lip with his teeth.  
  
“Oh?” Daryl says, and he opens his eyes, pulls back to look at Rick. “Because I was gonna blow you, but if just kissin’ you is a suitable reward –”   
  
Rick changes his tune quickly. “Well, not completely rewarded,” he amends. “Like, maybe half rewarded. Not totally.”  
  
“I see,” Daryl chuckles, pushing Rick’s t-shirt up, knuckles brushing across his stomach, making him shiver as he unbuttons his jeans. “In that case…”  
  
“Whoa, you meant right here? You’re gonna – Daryl, we could get caught, we might –”  
  
“Oh c’mon, there’s barely anybody here this week,” Daryl says with a grin, pulling Rick’s zipper down. He runs his hands down along Rick’s thighs and sinks to his knees. “I mean, I’d consider this an appetiser to the main course. But if you wanna wait ‘til later, we can wait.”  
  
He leans forward, pressing his face against the front of Rick’s boxers, mouthing at his cock through thin cotton. Rick lets out a moan and it already sounds broken and utterly indecent, but then, so is this. He pulls back for a moment and looks up at Rick, meets his eyes, raises an eyebrow at him and waits.  
  
“Fuck it,” Rick mutters. “Do it, please, Daryl, you’re killing me here.” Daryl slowly starts to tug Rick’s boxers down with his jeans but Rick gets impatient and knocks Daryl’s hands away, shoves them down. He’s half hard, and Daryl wraps one hand around him, one of Rick’s hands already carding through his hair before he even gets his mouth on him.  
  
This is another thing Daryl’s only done a few times, but this, he knows he’s good at. He wouldn’t say he’s proud of spending a little too much time in high school with some kid’s dick in his mouth, but at least Daryl liked that a lot more than letting said kid into his own pants when he wouldn’t have known what to do with Daryl’s cock in the first place. So this could be considered a talent, he supposes, and Rick confirms that when Daryl takes the head of his cock just between his lips, tongue dancing slowly across the slit, hand stroking upward the barest amount. Rick’s fingers tighten in Daryl’s hair and he gasps Daryl’s name like it’s a curse word all by itself.  
  
And then Daryl sucks Rick in, takes him as far as he can until the tip of his cock hits the back of his throat. Rick’s hips jerk in surprise and Daryl relaxes his jaw, his throat, tongue working the underside of Rick’s cock even as he keeps Rick halfway down his throat. Rick arches away from the counter, tugs at Daryl’s hair just a little, thighs shaking and muscles going taut.  
  
“Holy _shit_.” Rick’s voice is a hoarse whisper, and Daryl pulls away, leaves him wet, licks just under the head and then laps up droplets of pre-come. Rick makes a whining sound that comes from somewhere deep in his chest, and Daryl lets one hand roam to his ass, grabbing and pulling him forward into his mouth again, the other hand stroking his balls.  
  
Daryl revels in the taste of him, the mildly salty flavour of him lying heavy on his tongue, and something else that’s maybe just the manifestation of how much Daryl likes doing this to Rick. He looks up at Rick and Rick gasps, free hand gripping the edge of the counter, hard, until his knuckles go white. “Jesus Christ, you can’t do that to me,” he sighs, closing his eyes. “Gonna be over way too fast if you look at me like that.”  
  
Daryl pulls back, Rick’s cock sliding over his tongue like silk. “Food’s due to be ready in five minutes, gotta make it fast,” he says.  
  
“Fuck the food,” Rick mutters, hips rocking forward again into Daryl’s open mouth. “Got your dinner and dessert right here.”  
  
Daryl hums out a laugh and takes Rick into his mouth again, goes at it a little harder, a little faster until Rick is breathing just as hard and fast, until he’s all out moaning, the sound echoing around the little kitchen. Daryl pulls back, trails his tongue just across the head of Rick’s cock and Rick, body shuddering, stutters out a warning.  
  
There’s a second where he tries to push Daryl away but Daryl doesn’t let him and he gives up. A half second later, he’s spilling down Daryl’s throat, and Daryl swallows every last drop, just as the timer for the hen goes off. He pulls back, licking just the head again while Rick groans his name weakly, legs shaking. Daryl grabs at the edge of the counter and pulls himself back to his feet, kissing the corner of Rick’s mouth and moving to the oven, grabbing a potholder and pulling out the hen.   
  
It’s a long minute before Rick can even speak. “That… could live happy forever with your mouth on me,” he says, fumbling with his jeans as he pulls them up and buttons and zips them again.   
  
Daryl grins. “Good reward then?”  
  
“So good,” Rick breathes, “the best.”  
  
Daryl pulls plates and silverware from a bag he brought down to the kitchen with them and hands them to Rick. “Set the table and you might get another reward later.”  
  
“Blatant bribery,” Rick says, taking the plates.  
  
Daryl pulls him into a long kiss, lets Rick taste himself all over Daryl’s tongue. “What you gonna do about it, _Officer_?”  
  
“Nothing,” Rick says against his lips. “You just wait ‘til they gimme a set of handcuffs though.”

Daryl laughs, pecks Rick’s lips again and nudges him toward the little square table in the corner of the kitchen. “That’s what you really want the job for, huh?”  
  
Rick winks at Daryl and begins setting the table. “Well, it’s certainly a perk.”  
  
Daryl lets the pie continue to bake while he brings pots over from the stove and begins filling his and Rick’s plates. “Eat everything and you might get dessert,” he says.   
  
And Rick pulls him in for another kiss. “Pretty sure you probably cook better than my Mom. How could I not?”

#  


“I’m dying,” Rick groans, pushing away a scraped clean plate from a slice of pie. Daryl moves to the table to collect it and drops it in the sink with the rest of the dishes. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so stuffed.”

Daryl can’t help laughing. “I could throw a dirty joke in there but it’s too easy.”  
  
“Bite me, Dixon,” Rick says, pushing himself up from his chair and coming to stand behind Daryl who is almost elbow deep in dish water. Rick wraps his arms around him and kisses the back of his neck. “Thanks for dinner.”  
  
“Couldn’t let you starve on Thanksgiving,” Daryl replies. “That’d be irresponsible. And so much paperwork, y’know?”  
  
Rick laughs, pressing his lips against Daryl’s ear. “Smartass,” he murmurs. “Hey, we didn’t say what we were thankful for.”   
  
“We didn’t, did we?” Daryl pauses for a moment with a dish in one hand and a dishcloth in the other. He shifts in Rick’s arms and tips his head back on his shoulder, closing his eyes just for a moment. “I’m thankful for you, but I think you already know that.”  
  
“Even when I’ve been utterly oblivious?”  
  
“Even then,” Daryl promises.

Rick smiles and kisses Daryl’s cheek. “I think you already know I’m thankful for you, too.”

“Even when I’m too angry to see things clearly?” Daryl asks.  
  
“Even then. And hey, I don’t just mean… don’t get me wrong, the sex is unbelievably good and I love that I love you, but I’m thankful too that you’ve gotten me to this point, Daryl. ‘Cause I’m not sure I woulda gotten here, not for a long time. Not ever, maybe, if it hadn’t been for you. I’d have just ignored things about myself and put it aside and I think that woulda made me really unhappy.”  
  
Daryl turns and kisses Rick, one soapy hand coming up to give him a beard of bubbles, smirking. “I’m glad you’re happy.”  
  
“The happiest,” Rick says and pushes his face into Daryl’s, getting soap all over the both of them, laughing harder than Daryl’s ever heard. And he doesn’t think there’s ever been a time when just the sound of someone’s laughter could hit so hard, could make him feel lighter than air, could make him understand that love does not exist solely in the lines of a poem.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last chapter of this fic to feature an original poem of mine so I figured I should point out that the line in quotations in said poem was borrowed from John Donne's _Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions_. 
> 
> You also may have noticed that I have changed the chapters from 16 to 17... surprise, there's gonna be an epilogue after chapter 16! ;)

Daryl has come to realise that Rick, like the average college student, enjoys sleep. And while Daryl does, too, there’s always a sense in him that he’s wasting an opportunity to do something, even if it’s just reading, if he sleeps all day. So he expects Rick to still be asleep when he returns to the room after his early morning shower, towel wrapped around his waist – but he isn’t. He’s sitting up in Daryl’s bed, a sweatshirt in one hand, a piece of paper clutched in the other, brows furrowed.

“What’s that?” he asks, and Rick jumps, clearly not having heard Daryl open the door from the bathroom.

“I… I’m sorry,” he says. “I was just getting my sweatshirt from my bag ‘cause I was cold and when I bent down to get it, I saw this under the bed. This is your original poem, isn’t it?”

Daryl moves toward the bed and slips the towel off, curling back up next to Rick and pulling the covers up to keep them both warm. “It’s okay,” he says. “And yeah. That’s what I was writing before – well, y’know.”

“This is – I’ve never had anyone say anything like this about me,” Rick tells him, and his voice sounds a little choked.

“It’s unfinished,” Daryl says, quickly. “I’m sorry it’s not what I ended up bringing to class, but I just…” He trails off and Rick waves a hand.

“No, I know,” Rick answers. “I understand. Not like I didn’t deserve the poem you did submit, but this is beautiful. And about me. And I’m still kinda trying to get my head around it. That you feel this way.”

Daryl takes the poem from Rick. “Of course I feel this way. I’m in love with you, after all.” He smiles and sets the poem aside, handing Rick a Neruda book instead. “Anyway, Neruda is better than I am.”

“Debatable,” Rick says, leaning in to kiss him. But he takes the Neruda book anyway, begins flipping through it while Daryl lazily continues to kiss at his neck and down along his collarbone, then back up toward his throat.

Daryl feels the vibrations underneath his lips when Rick begins to speak. And it takes Daryl a second to realise that he’s reading from the book, looks up to see the book open to the page he had dogeared weeks before. And even more so than when he read Daryl’s poem in class, Rick reads perfectly this time, right from the first word, voice all lust and Neruda’s sensuality, all perfect cadence and flawless timing.

“ _I love the handful of earth you are_ – ”

Daryl gasps, just the smallest intake of breath, as if he’s the one being touched, being kissed. But in a way, the words do touch a certain part of him, and coming from Rick’s mouth… well, Daryl’s never believed in magic in his life but he might start now. He hadn’t bothered to see which poem Rick had marked in the book back when he did it, but it feels fortuitous that this happens to be one of his very favourites, that Rick seemed to know that before he even knew they would get this far.

Daryl moves, climbing over Rick to sit astride his thighs, leaning down to press his lips to his chest, feeling the rumble of his voice as if it’s rattling his ribcage.

“ _Because of its meadows, vast as a planet, I have no other star_ –”

Daryl licks a warm stripe down to Rick’s belly, and Rick’s voice breaks on these last words when Daryl nuzzles against the trail of hair leading down into Rick’s boxers. It becomes something of a game then, Rick’s voice becoming tremulous, unsteady, as he tries to continue reading while Daryl’s hands roam along his sides, fingertips dipping into the little valleys along his hips, making Rick shiver. _Vast as a planet_ , Daryl thinks, because he’s sure that even if he spends hours exploring Rick’s body, he’ll still find something new to love every time, a great many worlds to see, to touch, to taste.

“ _You are my replica of the multiplying universe_.”

There’s a small pause after ‘you,’ so much emphasis on the word and Daryl meets Rick’s eyes for a brief moment, finds the blue looking for all the world like flames, finds love and lust and an unspoken plea for Daryl not to stop. So he doesn’t, just continues to brush his lips along Rick’s skin, tongue tracing patterns over his hipbones as he slowly inches down his boxers, Rick lifting his hips long enough for Daryl to pull them all the way off.

His hands want to touch literally every inch of Rick, but he holds off for a moment, fingers dancing down between Rick’s thighs in a way that makes Rick shiver. He stutters on the next line of the poem, the rhythm of the words dissolving just for a moment as his tongue trips over itself. “ _Y-your wide eyes are the only light I know_ –”

Daryl slips between Rick’s legs, bends his head and before Rick has a chance to figure it out, to wrap his head around one moment and then the next, he tugs Rick forward so he’s flat on his back, and licks along the cleft of his ass up to his balls. He allows himself a shiver of his own when Rick make a noise of shock, but mostly of utterly unchecked arousal, the words of the poem suddenly splintered by a breathless stream of cuss words and Daryl’s name.

The book snaps shut and lands hard on Daryl’s desk, and as he presses his tongue against Rick’s entrance, licking and pushing his way in just the barest amount so that Rick all-out _whines_ , something rather incredible occurs. Rick continues to speak the words of Neruda’s sonnet, only the book is no longer in his hand and it takes Daryl a moment with his mouth buried against the deepest places of Rick and his brain cataloguing every specific sound of pleasure Rick is making to realise that holy shit, _he memorised Neruda_. He memorised a Neruda poem for _Daryl_ , and Daryl would get emotional if having your tongue half inside someone was the time to get emotional.

Instead, as the words tumble from Rick’s tongue like little paratroopers in an invasion of his mind, Daryl shows him how much he appreciates this kind of gesture, because he’s not sure Rick quite understands the depth of the impact this has. “— _from extinguished constellations_ –” Rick is saying, and Daryl thinks that all the constellations could extinguish and he’d still be here, his hands on Rick. Even if the world were floating through the deepest, darkest reaches of space, through little pops of light like lightbulbs burning out, stars dying all around them.

Daryl continues to flick his tongue across Rick’s hole, to press it inside him, and this kind of fucking is certainly something else, with Rick squirming beneath his tongue and whispering pleas for more between lines of poetry. Daryl obliges him, takes a half second break only to reach out a hand for the bottle of lube still sitting on his desk.

It’s slow, the way he works one finger inside of Rick, slow enough to be torture for both of them maybe, slow enough for millennia to pass, for stars to really go out. But he doesn’t want to hurt Rick, refuses to let Rick’s first time doing this be anything less than incredible, even if it means he goes slower than the turning of the Earth. Rick bites his lip on a grunt of pain, and Daryl looks up, meets his eyes, gives Rick a chance to tell him to stop. But he just shakes his head, breathes out and smiles, murmuring for Daryl to keep going.

Daryl wraps one hand around Rick’s cock, stroking just as slowly as he stretches him open, his own cock hard enough to almost hurt. If he didn’t have as much self control as he’s currently struggling to hold onto, he’d already be rutting against the sheets in desperation, just for a little bit of friction to offset the way Rick’s moans are making him feel.

Rick gasps out the next line: “ _Your skin throbs like the streak of a meteor through rain_.” And there’s a whimper between every other word, and then, to Daryl’s surprise, Rick is pushing back, shifting his hips and trying to get Daryl to move faster. Daryl takes this as a cue to press another finger inside of him beside the first, and Rick responds with a strained but blissful groan.

“This okay?” Daryl whispers. “Don’t wanna hurt you.”

“Doesn’t hurt,” Rick assures him. “Just different. But good different.” His voice sounds a lot like the way it does when he’s drunk, half-slurred but content, and something needy in it, too. Daryl moves his free hand up Rick’s chest, rubs his thumb across one nipple and smirks at the way Rick’s hips twitch. His eyelids flutter closed for a half second and then he looks back at Daryl; in the middle of opening Rick up for him the way flowers open for sunlight, Daryl has another moment of realisation that he could never have seen this all coming.

And maybe it’s not an appropriate moment to reminisce, but he remembers anyway: walking to class, his nose buried in a poetry book, bumping into Rick who pushed a flier on top of the open pages. “Rush week,” he’d said. “You wanna come?”

And Daryl had looked up, met startling blue eyes full of the brightly-lived life Daryl wished he could have had, and immediately wondered how to go about asking Rick if he wanted an apartment or a house and how many kids and if he preferred dogs or cats. Instead, he’d just mumbled, “What?”

And Rick had shot him that gorgeous grin, the one that instantly solidified Daryl’s idea of perfection and turned his knees into jelly at the same moment, and said, “Just come.” Daryl had bit his tongue to stop himself from telling Rick that if he smiled at him like that much longer, he was damn well _going_ to.

Rick moves one hand from the bedsheets just then, reaches up and pulls Daryl in by the back of his neck to kiss him, breaking him out of his memories. Daryl curls his fingers inside of him, earning himself another moan. “Stop daydreaming,” Rick tells him with a smile. “This is gonna be so much better than that.”

“You’re right,” Daryl says. “Just thinking about how we got here from the moment I first met you.”

Rick rocks his hips upward again so he presses back on Daryl’s fingers with a gasp. “Got here ‘cause you’re more patient than I deserve and too damn good to me,” he says breathlessly, and Daryl steals more and more of his oxygen with kiss after kiss. Finally, Rick pushes him back with a hand in the middle of his chest. “C’mon, Daryl. Want you to do this.”

“Okay,” Daryl says, nodding. “Yeah, wanna do this, so bad.”

He takes one last kiss, pulling his fingers free of Rick, then reaches over to the desk. He rifles through a messy drawer for the condoms Rick had shoved in there yesterday, all the while grinning and claiming that it’s probably best if they stay there for the rest of the semester. Daryl is hard pressed to argue with that; he certainly can’t complain that they’re fairly handy now, sitting right next to where they’re definitely going to need them.

He tears the condom wrapper open with his teeth, tries not to let his hand linger too long as he slides it on because as lush as the warmth of his own hand feels, Rick is right: it’s about to get so much better. Daryl leans back down over him, one hand between their bodies so he can touch Rick again as he pushes the head of his cock against his entrance. Rick closes his eyes and Daryl presses his cheek against Rick’s, murmurs in his ear, “If you need to stop, just tell me, okay?” Rick nods.

Daryl feels Rick’s whole body tense and then relax under him, one arm coming up to curl across Daryl’s back as Daryl move his hips forward slow and careful. He closes his own eyes, bites back a rough moan threatening to tear itself from his throat because holy _shit_ , this is literal paradise and he can feel the pleasant spark of orgasm in his belly already. He pushes it back as best he can, even though the mere idea of being inside Rick, let alone the suffocating feeling of just how fucking tight he is around him, is threatening to end this before it starts.

“Oh my god,” Daryl mumbles, and his voice doesn’t feel like his own, feels strange in his mouth like when you have too much sugar and your tongue goes raw. There’s a sort of white noise in his head, and it only breaks when he finally pushes all the way inside Rick, and everything suddenly sounds clear as a bell. He’s holding himself up from collapsing entirely on top of him with one shaking arm, panting just as hard as Rick, who looks utterly delirious.

Daryl expects there to be a minute, maybe two, but then Rick is wrapping his legs around Daryl’s back, shifting his hips upward again so that he’s pushing back against Daryl. The sound he makes then, with Daryl inside him and one hand still wrapped around his cock, is nothing short of some kind of hymn, or a prayer, a poem in its own right. Daryl immediately memorises exactly how it sounds because he wants to remember it forever.

His own hips start moving then, and he doesn’t remember giving them permission to, but Rick doesn’t seem to mind at all. His arm tightens around Daryl and there are words on his lips that sound like desperate appeals for more. Daryl strokes Rick’s cock just a little slower because he wants this to last more than he’s ever wanted anything. He buries his face against Rick’s neck, kissing at the flushed, warm skin and loving the way Rick’s pulse beats hard under his mouth. More than that, he loves the feeling of the goosebumps breaking out along Rick’s shoulders as he shudders and arches up against Daryl.

Rick turns his head, presses his face against Daryl’s hair with a gasp, and then he’s speaking again, and it takes Daryl a second to grasp that he’s continuing Neruda’s poem, in between these wicked little moans that Daryl just can’t get enough of.

“ _Your hips were that much of the moon for me_ –”

The rhythm of Rick’s words matches almost exactly the pace at which Daryl is moving inside of him, and if that isn’t one of the hottest things Daryl’s ever experienced in his entire life, he doesn’t know what is. Between lines of poetry, Rick appears to lose coherency entirely, babbling curse words and things that don’t really make sense, crying out with long, low moans and whimpers about how good this feels. Daryl thinks briefly that he could die happy now.

“Love you,” Daryl whispers, hips shaking with the way Rick clenches around him, and he doesn’t know if Rick’s doing it on purpose or just because it feels like instinct. “So fucking gorgeous, love you so much.”

“ _Your deep mouth and its delights_ ,” Rick continues in response, “ _that much sun_ –” His voice rises in a weak gasp at the end of this line, and Daryl swears his whole body is on fire with all of this. The poem is perfection, and in much the same way that Daryl is giving something to Rick, Rick is giving something back. And it’s like a gift, knowing that he knows these words by heart now, that Rick is pouring his all into it, that he picked this moment in time to give poetry back to Daryl in this way.

“You’re so perfect,” Daryl tells him, teeth catching at his earlobe. “Rick, you’re so perfect.”

Rick is rolling his hips upward now to meet Daryl on every thrust, and something about the way he moves is sending Daryl straight toward the edge, and he can’t tell if it’s been five minutes or ten or two hours, only that it’s definitely not going to last all night, no matter how much either of them might want it to.

“— _your heart, fiery with its long red rays_ –” Rick’s voice is shakier than ever now, hoarse and breaking, every word coming out breathlessly. Daryl murmurs little words of praise against his ear, because this is a form of worship in its own right, and Daryl only wants Rick to know that the trust between them, the devotion, is nothing short of life-changing.

“— _was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade_.” Rick barely gets through this line before he starts pushing his hips up faster, fucking into Daryl’s fist, and then he’s whimpering Daryl’s name and coming, warmth spreading between them. And it’s this that makes Daryl come so fast, a half second later; the mere juxtaposition of Rick’s words – the poetry, the way he said Daryl’s name. Ecstasy doesn’t so much creep along his spine as rush along it, like a match lighting up gasoline. Rick’s legs go slack around his waist, even as Daryl keeps thrusting into him, hips eventually stopping but body still shaking with such intensity that only both of Rick’s arms coming around him and holding him close eventually stop his body from quivering.

It’s a long, long time – and this, too, feels like hours – of Daryl lying still across Rick, trying to catch his breath, before Rick speaks. And his voice is heavy, blissful, sleepy and still half-gasped when he whispers the last line of the poem, mouth still pressed against Daryl’s hair.

“ _So I pass across your burning form, kissing you – compact and planetary, my dove, my globe_.”

And there are a hundred thousand things Daryl wants to say, only he realises that his face is wet with tears, and he doesn’t want Rick to know that damn him, he made Daryl actually _cry_. So he does his best to keep the sniffle out of his voice and merely says back, “I love you more than anything.”

#

Rick is snoring softly next to Daryl, and Daryl watches him for a long time, pushing his fingers through Rick’s curls over and over, amused at the way Rick pushes up against his hand in his sleep like a cat. After a while, when Rick rolls away toward the wall and pulls the covers with him, Daryl reaches toward the desk for his discarded poem and the Neruda book, bracing the sheet of paper against the book and grabbing for a pen. He takes a deep breath and begins to read.

 _A baited hook and bated breath_  
_You hung at the end of my line_  
_and I reeled until my arms were sore_  
_Pulled you in_  
_Watched you find your feet on this new land_  
_On this small, empty island of mine_  
_Restless, lonely native that I was,_  
_I watched you learn to breathe the air_  
_Reached out to touch the softness of you_  
_You startled easy, then_  
_I let you retreat and take your time_  
_You were wet behind the ears and alive behind the eyes_  
_(Eyes bluer than an ocean – eyes only for me)_  
_And were you to set fire to the home I built for you and I_  
_– slam a door and refuse me entry, strike a match and burn it down –_  
_I’d crawl inside and take the flames, breathe your name through ashy lungs_

And it’s there that Daryl had stopped before, had begun writing an entirely different poem, in the moment when he’d let his anger take hold and get the best of him, had refused Rick his forgiveness the way he suggested he wouldn’t in the words of the poem. But with an uncapped pen in his hand now, he has the power to change all that. Rick already has his forgiveness, of course, and they’re already so past it that it’s almost ceased to matter. But Daryl is not one to leave a poem unfinished. And so he begins to write from where he left off.

 _Rise like a phoenix_  
_And see you learn to love my colours after all_  
_Witnessing you discover what it is to be loved_  
_When I pick up my pen_  
_and make sure all the walls know your name,_  
_that there are a hundred ways I spell it:_  
_perfect/incredible/gorgeous/lover/perfectperfect **perfect**_  
_With such sudden clarity, I see the truth_  
_“No man is an island”_  
_And the two of us –_  
_We are a continent, a planet_  
_Circling the foreign shores of other galaxies_  
_Half a second away from finding our place_  
_in a constellation of our own making_

Satisfied with this, Daryl adds his name and the date at the bottom of the paper, folds it in half and slides it into the pages of the book, right in front of the dogeared sonnet 16, a poem that Daryl thinks will hold a different sort of meaning for him from now on. He leans down over the edge of the bed and slips the book inside the bottom of Rick’s bag. The cover is peeling apart in places, the spine in such awful shape from being read so often that the book cries out with more than just its author’s songs of despair. But it’s a sign of being well-loved, and if there’s another person that will love it as much as Daryl, it’s Rick. He tucks Rick’s clothing back over it and zips his bag back up, turning onto his side and curling against Rick.

He kisses the back of Rick’s neck, twirls the baby curls at the back of his neck around one finger, tugging the blanket loose from Rick’s grip and pulling it over the both of them. “I love you,” he whispers again, even though Rick is far too deep asleep to hear him. The only thing that matters is that he gets to say these words, that he gets to say them to _Rick_ and know that they are returned… that he could read a million poems, an infinite amount of words, and none of them will ever sound quite so sweet as these.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are... we've arrived at the last chapter! Well... except for the epilogue. Hopefully that will be up by the end of this week. My apologies for making you all wait two weeks for the final proper chapter of this, and I hope it's worth it. It's a bittersweet feeling, finishing my first epic length fic and having written over 50k words for this. I hope you all are looking forward to the epilogue! (: 
> 
> Thanks to my beta for taking me this far. Michelle_A_Emerlind, you are the best. (If you find a stray link in this chapter to a certain fic of MAE's... click it. Read it. You won't be sorry.)

“I’ll just wait out here,” Daryl mutters, leaning against the rail at the top of the steps to the frat house, distracted momentarily by his phone where he’s setting up a time to study for finals with Michonne when she returns to campus tomorrow. Rick pauses a foot from the door and turns back.

“C’mon… nobody’s gonna say anything or do anything to you. If they do, I don’t have a problem opening my mouth.”

Daryl scoffs, shoving his phone into his pocket. “I can stand up for myself, y’know.”

Rick smiles and closes the space between them, pressing a kiss to Daryl’s cheek. “I know you can. I’ve seen the right hook you got going on. I just mean that I’m not afraid to tell ‘em all to mind their own goddamn business.” He kisses Daryl’s mouth. “Or that I love you.” Another kiss. “Or that you are easily the hottest thing on this planet let alone in this house.”

Daryl smirks despite himself. “Alright, fine, let’s go,” he says, pushing Rick’s wandering hands away from his ass. “You can touch that later, promise.”

Rick laughs and takes Daryl’s hand instead, leading him inside. True to what Rick says, the few of Rick’s frat brothers that are hanging around the living room when they enter barely glance up, acknowledging Rick only with a lazy greeting and Daryl with a nod. Daryl doesn’t really think he could ever actually be friends with any of them, but he sees their acknowledgement of him as some form of acceptance, and he thinks that’s the best that he can hope for.

When they reach the top of the stairs, Daryl pauses for a moment. Through the open door just ahead of him, he can see Shane, lounging on his bed, a burger in one hand and a textbook in the other. He meets Daryl’s eyes, chews slowly and swallows. “Dixon,” Shane says, setting down his food and his book, and much to Daryl’s surprise, beckoning him forward. Rick starts to follow but Shane holds up a hand to him. “Give us a minute.” Rick starts to protest but Shane rolls his eyes. “Not gonna touch your boytoy. Go away, Rick.”

Daryl nods at him. “It’s cool.”

“I’ll go get my stuff, then,” Rick replies, and he looks between Daryl and Shane one more time before disappearing down the hall.

Shane sits up and Daryl approaches him cautiously. No matter what Shane says, Daryl’s not quite sure he trusts that he won’t earn himself a black eye in return for bloody nose he gave Shane. “You and Rick are together,” Shane begins.

“Yeah, look –” Daryl starts to interrupt, but Shane stops him.

“Let me say what I gotta say. I’m sure you know by now I’ve carried some stupid torch for that idiot since we were kids and I can’t say I’m not bitter about the fact that when he finally realised he’s about as straight as a fuckin’ circle that it wasn’t with me. But if he’s happy, then I guess I’m happy for him. But let me tell you one thing, Dixon. If you ever hurt him, you’ll be looking over your shoulder for me the rest of your _very_ short life thereafter. We clear?”

“Crystal,” Daryl says. He doesn’t bother to try and tell Shane that he would never hurt Rick. He knows that everybody says that and, as he’s learned pretty recently, sometimes people hurt each other when they don’t mean to. So instead, he just says, “Sorry I punched you, by the way.”

Shane shrugs. “You hit like a ten year old, but it ain’t like I didn’t deserve it. Sorry I was a dick.” He holds out a hand to Daryl, and Daryl shakes it, feeling an immediate sense of relief that even if he’s never gonna be best friends with Shane, that they’ve at least reached an understanding, that there’s peace between them. “Anyway,” Shane adds suddenly and quietly, gesturing behind Daryl. “Got my eye on someone else now.”

Daryl turns to glance over his shoulder. The guy who answered the door for him the day everything went a little crazy – Spencer, if he remembers correctly – is walking by. And Daryl never imagined a world where Shane Walsh’s ears would go red, but they are. He can’t help but grin broadly and Shane, just the way Rick does, shows him his middle finger.

“He into you?” Daryl asks.

Shane scowls. “We’re not gonna talk about _boys_ here like a coupla girls, Dixon.” But then there’s a pause and he mutters, “I don’t know.”

“Well, hey, Michonne got the girl she didn’t think was gonna go for her, so you never know, I guess.” He also thinks about how he ended up with Rick, which is still mindblowing, but he doesn’t wanna rub Shane’s face in it so he keeps that to himself.

Shane makes a noise of affirmation just as Rick reappears behind Daryl. “Everything good?” he asks hesitantly. He’s a little out of breath and half his clothes are hanging out of his bag. It couldn’t be clearer that he’d packed some of his things at top speed as if Shane could have actually torn Daryl limb from limb in the two minutes he’d been gone.

Daryl meets Shane’s eyes for a half second, gets a look back that plainly says he’s got his hands full with Rick and good luck, and Daryl claps Rick on the shoulder. “Relax, we’re good. C’mon, before your head explodes.”

Shane salutes Daryl as he herds Rick from the room and down the stairs.

“I was just worried you two were gonna knife each other,” Rick says, and Daryl shakes his head.

“Nah, we’re cool, me and him. We understand each other now.”

Rick still looks a little wary but he nods. “Good, I’m glad.” He tugs the door to the house shut behind them and pulls Daryl in for a kiss. “And I’m glad you came back inside with me.”

“Anywhere for you,” Daryl tells him. “Long as you go with me.”

“Always.”

#

"C’mon, we’ve laid around long enough, we gotta go meet Michonne," Daryl says, getting up from the bed with the intent of going for a basket of clean clothes he hasn’t found time to put away yet to find a shirt.

Rick sighs, not moving. “You already made me get up early, now you’re making me go out. I think there’s something evil in you.”

Daryl rolls his eyes. "Are you coming?"

Before he can get to the laundry basket, Rick reaches out to drag him back toward the bed again. He locks his arms around Daryl’s waist and his hands slide up and over his stomach.

"Oh, I'd _like_ to be coming," Rick responds with a laugh. He tugs Daryl down backward on top of him, rocks his hips upward against Daryl's ass.

“Rick, no, we have to –” Rick cuts Daryl off when he easily flips the two of them over so Daryl is face down against the mattress, and Rick is on top of him.

“I ever tell you I wrestled in high school?” Rick says, sucking at the back of Daryl’s neck, adding to the assortment of marks already left by his mouth.

“‘Course you did,” Daryl groans dryly, entirely unsurprised.

Rick moves onto his knees, starts kissing down Daryl’s back. “God, you’re gorgeous.”

“Fuck, we’re gonna be _late_ ,” Daryl whimpers, aware that’s not exactly the right response to being told he’s gorgeous.

Daryl can hear the smile in Rick’s voice when he nuzzles against the small of his back and says, “So let’s be late.”

#

Daryl can’t complain that his and Rick’s professor has cancelled their last scheduled poetry class to give them time extra time to study for Thursday’s final. He doesn’t even mind that the final is the week before their actual finals week, because getting it out of the way means more time with Rick and more time to study for other things. Which is why he made plans to meet up with Michonne to study for their gender and sexuality final, too, now that she’s returned to campus. However, Michonne has zero idea about him and Rick having sorted everything out, which means she glares daggers at Rick when he and Daryl drop into seats across from her at a table in the library.

But before Michonne can say anything, Daryl quickly heads her off. “We made up.”

“Understatement of the century,” Rick snorts, “but yeah… me and Daryl have recognised our epic love story and all that.”

Michonne’s face softens and she reaches out her hands to squeeze one of Daryl’s and one of Rick’s. “My boys,” she says fondly, releasing their hands and then slapping both of them hard across the knuckles. “Either of you ever get your heads that far up your asses again, don’t count on me being there.”

Daryl grins at her and Rick shrugs. “Don’t worry, my head is firmly out of my ass. I needed to make room for Daryl’s dick anyway.” Daryl blushes and elbows Rick and Rick protests, holding up his hands to both of them. “Jesus, all I do is love you guys and I’m getting beaten up over here.”

Daryl rolls his eyes and Michonne fixes her attention on him. “Glad you figured it all out,” she says, “I was worried that –” Michonne breaks off in mid sentence. “What the hell is that?”

“What?” Rick and Daryl say in unison.

Michonne makes a face. “Oh, you two are real cute, aren’t you?” She leans across the table and points at Daryl’s neck. “ _That_.”

Daryl feels his face flushing furiously as Michonne grabs his chin, turns his head this way and that to get a better look. “Oh my _god_ , Rick.” Daryl pulls away and tries in vain to tug the collar of his shirt up to hide all the marks Michonne has already seen, the ones he’d all but forgotten about after spending several days locked away in his room with Rick. Honestly, he’d almost forgotten the public existed at all, and is suddenly very glad he’d been wearing his leather jacket zipped up as far as it was when they’d been at the frat house yesterday.

“What?” Rick says innocently, but the smug smirk on his face says quite a bit more.

Michonne raises an eyebrow. “You know _what_. Lay off the boy’s neck, he looks like he got mauled by an octopus.”

Rick shrugs. “He wasn’t complaining when I was fu –”

“ _Okay_!” Daryl interrupts, loudly, before this line of conversation can go further (and before his face turns into an actual tomato). “How ‘bout we don’t discuss my ass and just study for finals, like we came here for?”

Rick laughs and he and Daryl start digging through their bags for textbooks and papers, while Michonne clears her throat and taps her fingers on the tabletop, as if she’s waiting for something.

Finally, Daryl shakes his head and grins at her. “Alright, tell us all about it.”

“She’s amazing,” Michonne breathes. “And I think she’s really into me but I think she’s kinda scared but damn, she’s… she’s something.”

Daryl looks at Rick out of the corner of his eye and says, “Yeah, I know someone who was scared, too. Sometimes you gotta wait it out.”

“And sometimes you’ve gotta just go for it,” Rick says. “One or the other of you is gonna figure it out eventually and either way you put everything on the line. She might freak out.”

“But if she really is into you,” Daryl continues, “she’ll figure out how much she wants you and it’ll work. Even if things are strained for a while.”

Michonne sits back in her chair, lips pursed, looking between the two of them. “You two working out some kinda motivational speaking thing now? Cute routine you got.”

Daryl laughs and shakes his head. “Look, we’re no experts. We just know how we feel and what we just figured out. All the pieces just kinda fall into place one day if it’s gonna work and you’ll know it when they do. Trust me.” Rick’s hand squeezes his knee under the table and rests there, and Daryl relaxes into his touch, placing his hand on Rick’s and interlocking their fingers.

“Yeah,” Michonne says. “Yeah, I guess you both are the poster children for this kinda thing now.”

“That’s what we dream of being,” Daryl says, with a mock dreamy sigh. “Hey, you got the notes from when we went over that last chapter? Wasn’t really paying much attention that day.”

“Sure,” Michonne replies, shuffling pages of notes around until she finds the right ones and pushes them across the table at Daryl. “I’m good on those if you wanna keep ‘em until after the exam.”

“You’re amazing,” Daryl sighs.

“So I’ve been told.”

The three of them go on like this for a while, talking out things from various classes between them. It turns out that Michonne knows more about poetry than she’s let on, and Rick, to his credit, starts swearing far too loudly for the library about bisexuality and being gay when Michonne asks Daryl his thoughts on one of their study questions for their test regarding so-called “deviant” sexuality.

“I’ll deviant my foot up someone’s ass –” Rick is in the middle of saying when the librarian on duty shoots them a dirty look and hisses at them to be quiet while Daryl laughs.

“I’ve never loved you more,” Daryl whispers to Rick, leaning close and pecking him on the cheek.

Michonne’s phone buzzes on the table and she snatches it fast as lightning. Daryl rolls his eyes. “You’re worse than me when this one texts me,” he says, gesturing at Rick.

“She’s not patient,” Michonne says. “Figure I better get back to her quick before she finds someone else to hang out with.”

“Pfft. She wants you and you know it,” Rick says, flipping through their poetry textbook. “You know you’re hot.”

Michonne doesn’t reply to this, thumbs rapidly tapping out a message back to Andrea. “She wants to meet up and double date with Maggie and Glenn, apparently. You guys wanna come? Could make it a triple date.”

Daryl shakes his head. “As tempting as that sounds, I’d rather let that poor pizza boy suffer with three strong-willed women all night.”

Rick looks up. “Do I even wanna know how Maggie ended up with a random pizza boy?"

Michonne shakes her head. “It happened pretty much _exactly_ how you think it’d happen with Maggie,” she assures Rick, stuffing her things back into her bag and standing up. “I gotta go. Be good boys, no sneaking off to the archives for sex.” She blows an air kiss at each of them, drops a wink in their direction, and disappears around the shelves.

Daryl and Rick last approximately ten more minutes, studying in silence before Rick nudges Daryl’s shoulder with his own. “You know,” he says quietly, “I’ve never been to the archives.”

Without another word, he stands and slips through a nearby door and up the stairs to the archives on the top floor of the library. Daryl leaves their books where they are and after a few minutes, he follows Rick. The archive room is half dark, full of shelf after shelf of old out of print books and newspapers and academic journals. Daryl wanders between them, looking for Rick, finding him all the way in the back where he reaches out from between two shelves and drags Daryl into the corner.

Rick pushes him up against a shelf, doesn’t waste time, starts kissing Daryl breathless. “Jesus, Rick,” Daryl whispers, gasping when Rick’s hand, resting on his hip, slides down over the front of his jeans. “And you were worried we were gonna get caught in the kitchen last week.”

“What can I say?” Rick breathes, catching Daryl’s bottom lip in his teeth and biting gently before pulling away. “You’ve made me reckless.”

Daryl wants to count the seconds between the moment jeans come open and hands begin touching, is tempted to count the seconds before they get caught because he’s worried they actually will this time. But with Rick’s hands on him, time slows to a crawl and there’s no way to tell if they’re there for ten minutes or an hour. Daryl only knows that when it’s all over, he grabs the first book he sees off the shelf after licking his fingers clean of Rick, for the mere purpose of looking like they actually came up here for something legitimate.

It’s only when he returns to his seat two floors below, with Rick at his side grinning like the Cheshire cat, that he realises two things: 1.) an anatomy book from 1944 is useless to his studying and 2.) he’s had plenty enough hands on lessons in anatomy as of late to know damn well more than this book could ever teach him.

#

A week after the library, Daryl is lying in his bed, actually counting down the minutes this time. 48 more hours until the semester ends. 48 more hours until Merle shows up to get him. 48 more hours until he has to go an entire month without seeing Rick, until he’s god knows how many miles away in some shitty motel room, missing Rick the way you miss a front tooth. He’s tried not to think about it up ‘til now, but now that finals have come to an end for him, a sense of dread is slowly setting in until he feels it like a physical weight resting on his chest. They have to talk about it soon, have to stop avoiding the distance that will be upon them before they know it.

The door opens in the midst of Daryl’s thoughts, Daryl having given Rick his key to get back in when he was finished with his last final. He’s about to sit up, ask how it went, but he doesn’t get the chance before Rick drops his key on his desk, kicks off his boots, and throws himself down on top of Daryl, knocking the wind out of him. “Hey,” he says, grinning and claiming Daryl’s mouth in a kiss that makes him even less able to breathe.

“Hey,” Daryl answers when Rick pulls away, and he’s breathless but happy just to have Rick here, as always. Daryl wraps his arms around him, holds him tight, and waits to get some air back. “How’d the test go?”

Rick shrugs. “Dunno, pretty good, I think. I’m a genius, you know.”

Daryl sighs. “Tell you that one time and your head inflates.”

Rick kisses Daryl on the tip of his nose. “Hey, I _am_. I picked you, didn’t I? When I had _dozens_ of suitors lined up.”

“Suitors? What are you, a Jane Austen character?”

Rick shrugs again. “I don’t know shit about Jane Austen.”

Daryl shakes his head. “Gonna have to keep educatin’ you, Grimes.” He pauses and kisses Rick again before taking a deep breath and trying to get the inevitable over with. “Hey, we need to talk.”

“About my lack of Jane Austen knowledge? Because if it’s a deal breaker, I’ll start reading right now.”

Daryl laughs, running his fingers along Rick’s spine. “Nah. Just… semester’s pretty much over now and I’m leavin’ here soon and so are you and we haven’t talked about being apart for a month and we gotta because that’s gonna suck so fuckin’ much, Rick.”

“We’re not,” Rick says abruptly.

“Not what?”

“We’re not gonna be apart for a month. Jesus, I forgot all about this with finals going on. You’re coming home with me for the break. My Mom invited you.”

Daryl feels his eyes widen like saucers. “Rick, I can’t do – I can’t be a burden like that. That’s a whole month, I’m not –”

“Baby,” Rick says solemnly, and Daryl doesn’t think Rick’s ever called him that before, which is how he knows that Rick is being very, very serious. “You are not going to be a burden. Look, my dad took off a few years ago and my Mom still cooks like she’s cooking for a whole army, so she’ll be glad to have someone else there to feed and spoil that isn’t just my random aunts and uncles and cousins. I was gonna invite you anyway but she’s been pestering me to no end to bring you home to meet her. I mean, it’s up to you, I know you got your brother, but if you wanna stay with me, you are way more than welcome.”

Daryl doesn’t even have to think about it twice. As much as he loves Merle, it won’t even be close to the first Christmas they’ve spent apart, and if he’s honest with himself, he’d much rather wake up next to Rick every day for a month straight than wake up in a trashy Motel 6 with his strung out brother.

“Okay,” he whispers, and he pulls Rick into another kiss, fingers sliding up into his curls, holding even tighter to him.

“Okay?” Rick murmurs against his lips.

“Yeah, okay, I’ll come.”

Rick grins. “ _Yeah_ , you will.”

“Oh god, shut up,” Daryl mumbles, closing his eyes. “We can _not_ have sex at your house where your _mother_ lives.”

Rick tangles up his legs with Daryl’s, and Daryl feels the rumble of his laughter as Rick buries his face into his neck. “Oh, I beg to differ. We are gonna have _all_ the sex at my house. I mean, c’mon, before I got to know you, you were quieter than a mouse. Just gonna have to get you to learn to keep quiet again.”

“Hate you,” Daryl huffs.

“You love me,” Rick answers, mouth against Daryl’s jaw.

“To every goddamn moon and back,” Daryl admits.

“Love you, too. _So_ much, Daryl.”

With Rick lying on top of him like this, close enough to be a part of him, Daryl can think back to a time when there was nothing he could do, nowhere else he could go – certainly not to someone else’s home – and so he built a kind of home in his head. A place nobody but he was allowed to be, quiet and peaceful and tranquil, a wood untouched by anybody but him. A wood where he could stand without buckling to his knees under the force of a fist or a belt or a piece of nature itself turned into a weapon.

But now, that calm place in his mind where he can retreat when the pressures of life set in looks more like Sweetwater Creek. It looks like the bed in this dorm room, a hundred books of verse and every word of it love. It looks like the classroom where a professor forced him and a boy with no love for poetry and a terrible hangover to stop crossing paths and merge onto the same one. It looks like strife overcome and a hand in his and the curve of a lush mouth sweetened by a honeyed accent and a touch so ecstatic as to feel like transcending every part of the known universe. It looks like an old overpass, it looks like having friends, it looks like actually knowing what love means. 

And what it means is loving someone else, but most of all, it means loving himself, for the first time in a very, very long time. And for that, Daryl can only thank an old Chilean man buried deep in the ground, and all his lucky stars that just happened to align and bring him someone that taught him, finally, that hearts do not exist solely to be broken, someone that defines the intensity of it all, someone who _is_ poetry.


	17. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Exciting news!** We’ve made it! (: The absolute very end, the epilogue. Or is it? 
> 
> I’ve decided to write a few scenes over again… this time, though, they’ll be from Rick’s perspective. Of course, I’m not gonna pull a Stephenie Meyer and write the whole thing over again from Rick’s POV. However, I will take **requests** ( _within reason_ ) for scenes that you, as my lovely and faithful readers, would like to see. I’ll write them and post them in a sort of Bonus Scenes fic as separate chapters. It’ll be like DVD extras! I probably won’t be able to do them all, but part of writing this from only Daryl’s POV meant that we missed some things that Daryl couldn’t have seen or known, and my intention in doing this is to understand Rick’s motives better and not just from the standpoint of Daryl as a somewhat biased and unreliable narrator. So if there’s a scene you’d like to see, please let me know in the comments or via a message on [Tumblr](http://darylldixonn.tumblr.com/ask) and there’s a chance I’ll write it. 
> 
> In the meantime, please enjoy the epilogue, and know that you have my utmost love and appreciation for sticking with this fic and commenting chapter by chapter as many of you have. I adore you, my dear readers, and as an additional treat, check the end notes! (: So very much love.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been in a bed this big,” Daryl says, curling into Rick’s side in his queen size bed, trying not to be jealous that teenage Rick slept on a fluffy cloud and just be glad that he gets to be in it for a whole damn month. Rick pulls Daryl into him and cocoons them in the comforter.

“Show you exactly how comfy it is later,” he promises sleepily, nosing into Daryl’s hair. “It’s the asscrack of dawn, go back to sleep.”

“It’s ten,” Daryl corrects, pressing a kiss to Rick’s neck. They’d driven to Rick’s late last night after dinner with Maggie, Michonne, and a grumpy-looking Shane who bickered, surprisingly, not with Daryl the entire time but with Maggie, who liked to call people out on their idiocy. They’d gotten there long after dark, unloaded Daryl’s bike from where’d they’d just managed to squeeze it into the back of Rick’s SUV with the back seats folded down, and collapsed into bed twenty minutes later after a hasty shower.

“It’s not,” Rick argues. “It’s break. Time doesn’t exist on break.”

Daryl bumps Rick’s chin with his head and then kisses his lips. “So we just gonna stay in bed all day then?” he murmurs.

“Mhmm,” Rick responds, between kisses. “Stay here all day and make out and –” Rick stops short and groans when he hears a sudden clatter from downstairs. “Except my Mom’s already awake and making breakfast for us. Brace yourself.”

“For what?”

“For meeting her. She’s going to squeeze the hell out of you, tell you you’re too skinny, and try to force ten pancakes down your throat.”

Daryl doesn’t even think this sounds like a prediction; clearly, he’s seen this kind of thing from her before and knows what’s coming. But, if he’s honest with himself, he looks forward to meeting the woman who raised this boy with the heart of pure gold, the one who pushed himself to overcome struggle for Daryl, the one who loves him even when Daryl has wondered if he deserves love at all. Knowing now that he does, and ever grateful that Rick has given it to him, he wants to see exactly who instilled in him the fierceness he possesses.

“Should we go down then?” Daryl asks, and Rick nods, stretches, and rolls out of bed, offering Daryl a hand to pull him up. He rifles through a drawer for an old pair of boxers and a t-shirt, and Daryl digs through a suitcase to find suitable enough PJ bottoms and a shirt that doesn’t look holey enough to earn a visit from the Vatican.

“Good to go?” Rick asks him, and Daryl nods.

“My – my hair look alright?”

Rick laughs and pulls Daryl into a hug. “Baby, your hair looks like you’ve been rolling in the woods all night but it’s my mama you’re meeting, not the president. Don’t worry. She’s seen me wake up looking like a poodle half my life, this is nothin’.” He runs his fingers through Daryl’s hair but makes no effort to flatten it, then presses a soft kiss to his lips to reassure him. Still, Daryl takes Rick’s hand and leaves the sanctuary of his bedroom with him, hoping he looks halfway presentable.

The smell of bacon is strong in his nose the moment they reach the stairs, and only gets stronger as they descend. Daryl feels his stomach growl, but is momentarily distracted by the photos lining the staircase, photos of a much younger Rick, going all the way back to infancy the further down they get. He has to laugh at how many there are, as if Rick’s mom couldn’t decide on how many photos to display for each stage of Rick’s life and decided instead to display them all. And beside the hunger in his belly, there’s a soft warmth growing, too, something familial and lovely, something he’s only felt a handful of times in his life but is thankful he can still recognise when it matters.

But still, he hesitates when Rick pulls him along the hallway at the bottom of the stairs, toward the kitchen, for a moment feeling like an intruder in someone else’s home and wanting to go back and hide up in Rick’s room. But there is never any better moment for anything than the present, no better opportunity that will present itself later, no other way he can be that will make Rick’s mom like him more if she decides she doesn’t. So he sucks in a breath, sucks it up, and lets Rick tug him past the doorframe, into the kitchen.

A short, thin, curly-haired woman stands like a sentry at the stove, carefully frying bacon in one pan and making pancakes in another, and she only turns around when Rick clears his throat to announce their presence. Her eyes widen and her face splits into a broad smile, the same smile Daryl sees on Rick’s face all the time. And even from several feet away, he can tell that her eyes are precisely the same shade of blue as her son’s.

“Mom, this is my boyfriend –” Rick begins, but she interrupts him.

“Daryl!”

And Daryl barely has time to acknowledge in his own mind the fact that Rick just used a word he’s not previously used about Daryl before Rick’s mom is rushing over, sidestepping her own son, and pulling Daryl into a tight embrace. He’s frozen in surprise for a moment, but before he even realises it, his own arms are closing tight around her, and he’s holding her almost as tight as she holds him. She smells like Chanel #5 and cookies, almost exactly the way his own mother used to, and he has to swallow both to get rid of the immediate lump in his throat and the words “I missed you” that are on his tongue before he can center himself and remember that this is not his own mother but Rick’s, that he’s never met her before now.

After a long hug, she pulls back and holds his face in her hands, smiling. “Well, if you aren’t just as lovely as a day is long!” Daryl feels himself blush but has to smile back at her, at the drawl in her voice that is even more pronounced in person; it stands out like nothing else when she practically coos at him the way she does.

“I see now where Rick gets his good looks,” he tells her, “so I hope you’ll allow me to say the same about you, ma’am.”

She squeaks, actually _squeaks_ at him with delight. “And so polite!” She turns to Rick and stage whispers, “You better keep ahold of this one, baby, ‘fore he realises he’s way too outta your league.”

Rick laughs and shoots a grin at Daryl over his mother’s shoulder when she leans in to hug him, too. “I plan on it, don’t worry.”

Rick’s mom pulls away from him and pats him on the shoulder, looking over at Daryl. “You can call me Betty, darlin’,” she says, and then turns to look back at Rick. “And you can get over there and set the table.”

Rick shakes his head. “Unbelievable,” he mutters, throwing up his hands and moving toward the cupboards for plates. “Come home to see my sweet, wonderful mama and I gotta _do_ stuff.”

“I can help,” Daryl offers quickly, eager to feel like he’s actually contributing something to being here, but Betty snorts.

“Nonsense, this one’s just full of it,” she says, gesturing at Rick. “You sit down, sweetheart, ‘fore you break something with how skinny you are. I’ll feed you up right.”

Rick grins as he brings plates and a handful of silverware to the table, looking at Daryl as if to say, _See? Told you_.

But Daryl loves her already, is appreciative of the fact that she seems to love him without knowing a thing about him and thereby without condition. And surely she must know by now that he and her son have both fought each other and fought like hell to remain together despite judgment from others and odds that didn’t seem to sit so well in their favour. But she looks at Daryl the same way she looks at Rick, like he’s her own child. She looks at him like he is exactly what she expected Rick to one day bring home, even though he knows that it’s beyond unlikely that he was ever in her hopes for her son. And when she turns and places a stack of pancakes on his plate with a side of bacon big enough to feed three of him, he’s never felt more a more powerful sense of belonging.

#

Christmas Eve sneaks up on Daryl before he even realises what day it is. One second, it seems like he’s only just meeting Rick’s mother, and the next, it’s already been a week and a half and Rick’s house is lit up by brightly coloured lights and decked out in tinsel and mistletoe. There are presents stacked under the tree, and Daryl has noticed his name on many of them, has already thanked Rick and his mother a million times over for their hospitality and told them almost as many times that gifts weren’t necessary.

“Nonsense,” Rick’s mom had said, “you’re family now. You deserve gifts, too, baby.” She’d kissed his cheek, told him to hush, and come home the next day with even more.

Daryl had taken his bike out one day while Rick had (very unhappily and at urging from his mother) gone to see his dad, and gotten a few things for Rick and his mom with money Merle had deposited into his bank account as a Christmas gift. Daryl’s still not sure he wants to know exactly where the money came from, but at least he’s put it to good use.

Daryl and Rick wake close to noon on Christmas Eve, and spend a little time cuddling in bed before wandering down to the kitchen where Daryl, now feeling quite at home, starts digging through the pantry for ingredients to make cookies. While he hunts down what he needs, Rick drags bags of laundry he’s been procrastinating on since they arrived home down to the basement, clearly intent on avoiding more of his mother’s dirty looks when she mentions, repeatedly, that “it’s not gonna do itself Rick and you know damn well that I’m not doing it.”

Maggie, Michonne and Shane have been invited over that evening for a pre-Christmas dinner, and as far as Daryl knows, each of them is bringing a plus one. It’s for that reason that he’s planning on making double batches of several different kinds of cookies, and Rick’s mom has run out to get the ingredients they don’t have based on recipes he’d given her earlier that week. He figures that even though he and Shane came to a certain kind of peace, he can always up the chances of actual future friendship by providing cookies. He’s sure not even Shane could say no to that.

Daryl starts mixing what he can for the time being – triple chocolate chip cookies that have milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate bits in them, only pausing when Rick finally returns from the basement and slides his arms around Daryl’s waist. 

“You get lost down there?” Daryl jokes, and Rick’s voice is thick with emotion when he answers.

“No… but I found this.” He moves one arm up until Daryl can see what’s in his hand: the Neruda book, with Daryl’s now completed original poem sticking out between the pages. “When did you…?”

“When you fell asleep that day you found the unfinished bit of it… after we… y’know.” Daryl grins at him and blushes. “Was wondering when you’d find it.”

“Shoulda known better than to put it in there,” Rick says, chuckling, in an obvious attempt to hide the fact that he’s closer to tears than Daryl’s ever seen him. “When have you ever seen me do laundry?” He kisses Daryl’s cheek. “It’s beautiful. It means a lot to me that you finished it.”

“I’m glad that it means that much to you,” Daryl tells him. “And I’m glad that you liked the finished product.”

“Pretty sure your grocery lists are amazing, let alone your poetry. Thank you.” He pulls away and turns Daryl to face him for a moment, leaning in to kiss him. “I mean it. Thank you.”

Daryl hugs him close. “You’re welcome.” 

After a long moment, Rick pulls away and hops up onto the counter, next to Daryl’s bowl of cookie dough. Daryl notices out of the corner of his eye that he reads the poem several more times, in between handing Daryl measuring spoons and cups when he asks. This seems to satisfy him for a while until he huffs, obviously bored.

“Y’know, if you let me –” Rick begins, but Daryl knows where this is going.

“Not a chance, Grimes. But you can unwrap these.” Daryl grins at him and shoves a bowl of wrapped Hershey’s Kisses at him meant for the peanut butter blossom cookies.

Rick grumbles under his breath, “When I said I wanted kisses earlier, this wasn’t what I meant.”

“Help me with those Kisses and you might get some real ones,” Daryl says, leaning in and kissing the corner of Rick’s mouth to illustrate. “I think we operate well in the kitchen on a rewards system for you.”

“You make me sound like I’m five,” Rick says, narrowing his eyes and reluctantly beginning to pull the foil wrappers off the Kisses.

“You cook like you’re five,” Daryl laughs and Rick leans over and flicks him on the nose.

“I’m taking all your presents back. And I got you some real good ones.”

“Uh huh,” Daryl says, “bet you got me socks or somethin’.”

“Well, now you’ll never know. And they might’ve been the best socks in the universe, Daryl. The _best_.”

Daryl squeezes Rick’s knee and goes back to rolling dough into little balls, placing them on a baking sheet. “Ain’t it better that I’m the one who can cook anyway?” he asks. “I mean, you’re gonna go out there and be some tough guy cop all hours of the day, and y’know, whatever the hell I do with my life, I’ll probably be home earlier than you. Gonna fall to me to cook dinner.”

Rick makes an exaggerated ‘aww’ sound. “You been planning out our future, Dixon?”

And Daryl leans in for a real kiss this time, pulls back and murmurs, “Every day.” 

Rick smiles and there’s a flash of movement when he sits back on the counter and Daryl moves away.

“What’d you just do?” Daryl asks suspiciously, taking a step back toward Rick who holds up his hands, trying to look as innocent as possible. He swallows quite blatantly and then smirks.

“Nothing. Didn’t do anything, don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Daryl raises an eyebrow at him then casts a sidelong glance at the bowl of cookie dough on the counter at Rick’s side, gesturing at the obvious dent where Rick swiped his fingers through it.

“Uh huh,” Daryl says again. “You know, Rick, you’re so full of shit, your eyes are turnin’ brown.”

Rick just leans over and ruffles up Daryl’s hair. “Really good cookies, though,” he says, and ducks out of the way of Daryl throwing a measuring spoon at him.

#

It takes all day for Daryl to finish baking, and by the time Maggie and Michonne show up with Glenn and Andrea, and Shane wanders in a half hour after them with Spencer in tow looking confused as if he doesn’t remember how he got there, Daryl is ready to collapse. He’d just put the finishing touches on a dessert tray full of cookies for after dinner, and gift boxes of cookies for their friends to take home before they’d all arrived, and the second he’s done, he drops into an armchair in the living room with Rick squeezed in next to him as everyone hangs up coats.

Rick has one arm curled around Daryl’s neck and he pulls him close, kissing his temple and whispering, “You’re a wizard.”

Daryl shrugs and smiles, tipping his head onto Rick’s shoulder. “Was nothin’.”

“It was everything,” Rick says. “Really, they’re gonna love ‘em and I love ‘em and I love you, my little Keebler elf.”

Daryl closes his eyes just briefly and yawns, muttering, “My cookies are way better than Keebler.”

 _Briefly_ turns out to be a forty-five minute nap while Rick’s mom finishes dinner and their friends take up seats in the living room, laughing and talking and watching TV. Or at least, that’s what Rick tells Daryl happened when he wakes up, because the moment his eyes had closed, he’d been far too gone to know. 

Daryl only gets up to go to the table, hugging their friends and properly meeting Andrea, Glenn and Spencer on the way to the kitchen. Even Shane gives him an awkward pat on the shoulder that seems to be an effort to mimic a hug and thanks him for the cookies. Daryl pulls him aside in the hallway before they sit down. 

“So it turned out okay then?” he asks quietly, gesturing at Spencer.

Shane shrugs. “Dunno. Don’t think he knows what he wants but the sex is good.”

Daryl snorts out a laugh and shakes his head. “Hey, man, whatever works, right?”

Shane nods and follows him in, squeezing into a spot at the crowded table between Rick and Spencer. Daryl takes the spot on Rick’s right, and Michonne makes her way to sit on his other side so she can rant to him about the two points she apparently lost on their final exam in their gender and sexuality class. 

It’s not a full-on dinner like Rick’s mom has planned for tomorrow with Rick’s family, but there’s still enough food left over at the end that Rick’s mom sends everyone on their way with containers of various things, unwilling to hear a word against it. Rick and Daryl say goodbye at the door, promising to get together when they return to school for the following semester.

Rick’s mom lets them escape upstairs without assigning Rick dish duty, and Daryl is ready to go right back to sleep the second Rick shuts the bedroom door behind them. He yawns and Rick pulls him close. “C’mere, worker bee,” Rick says, and pulls Daryl to him by a belt loop, planting a soft kiss on his lips and reaching down to the hem of Daryl’s shirt to pull it up over his head. Daryl leans into Rick, wraps his arms tight around him and lets him unbuckle his belt, unbutton his jeans and push them down around his ankles. Daryl does his best to get Rick undressed too, but only gets his shirt off before he gives up and Rick has to help.

“Didn’t know you wanted this to be a strip tease,” Rick says and Daryl smiles sleepily at him. Rick runs a hand down along Daryl’s belly, making him shiver, and slips it inside his boxers. “Still awake?”

Daryl feels his whole body go warm, all his muscles tensing with Rick’s touch. “Sorta,” he answers, and his body is clearly more awake than his mind, responding just as easily as he always has, before he even knew Rick and only knew the sight of him and the touch of his own hand.

Rick pulls away long enough to slide Daryl’s boxers to the floor, and pushes him backward toward the bed until they reach it. Rick allows Daryl to crawl in first before he slips in next to him, pulling the covers over the both of them. And then his hand curls back around Daryl’s cock, and despite his tiredness, he rocks upward into Rick’s fist, lazy little thrusts that do just enough to satisfy.

Rick captures his mouth in a kiss, and with the pressure of Rick’s lips on his, the way his thumb rubs across the head of Daryl’s cock both rough and soft at the same time, it doesn’t take very long. Daryl would be embarrassed by how little time it took if the sweet sensation of orgasm washing over him hadn’t come so close to full on knocking him out. He’s barely aware of Rick cleaning him up, barely aware of the sound of his own voice when he says “Pay you back tomorrow, love you.” The last thing he hears is an _I love you_ , and the last thing he feels is Rick’s mouth against his neck before he seems to swim into the blurred depths of the Christmas lights around Rick’s window and closes his eyes.

#

Christmas morning at Rick’s house is the Christmas morning Daryl never had at his own. Rick is no more than an overgrown child, waking up at 7am and prompting Daryl to lean over and check for a fever. “You feelin’ okay?” he asks. “This is a strange hour for you.”

But Rick just looks at him like he’s the one that’s insane. “Uh, it’s _Christmas_ , Daryl, can’t you feel the magic?”

And Daryl just shakes his head and laughs. “Yeah, magic. Must be to get you up at this kinda time.”

“Shush, you,” Rick tells him. “Let’s go open presents.”

“Is your mom even awake?” 

“You don’t know her well enough by now?” Rick asks. “That crazy woman will have been up since 5:30 prepping for dinner. Now c’mon, I want you to see your gifts.”

Daryl yawns and pecks Rick on the cheek. “Didn’t return ‘em after all, huh?”

Rick shakes his head. “Nah. Figured I’d give you somethin for all the trouble I’m gonna be the rest of your life.”

Daryl presses his face into Rick’s neck and kisses there, too. “Ain’t gotta get me nothin’ for that, knew you were trouble the moment I laid eyes on you.”

“And you still wanted me?” Rick asks, sliding out of bed and pulling Daryl along with him. 

Daryl smacks him on the ass. “Got a cute ass, I’m a sucker for that kinda thing.”

Rick narrows his eyes at Daryl. “You take that back. My ass is not just cute. It’s _incredible_.”

Daryl bursts into laughter and pulls Rick into a hug before allowing him to get dressed. “That it is,” he murmurs into Rick’s ear. “Love you. Merry Christmas.”

“Love you more,” Rick says. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

“The best Christmas of my life.”

#

Daryl is trying not to cry. He’s sitting on the floor in front of the couch with Rick next to him, a pile of unwrapped gifts spread around them, half of them Rick’s and half of them Daryl’s. After he’d thanked Rick’s mom so profusely that eventually she had to tell him to hush, she’d retreated to the kitchen to continue making dinner, not knowing when the rest of Rick’s family will show up. But Daryl can’t focus right now on the slightly strange prospect of meeting Rick’s aunts and uncles and random assortment of cousins. Instead, his eyes are firmly glued to Rick’s last gift, which is sitting in his lap.

His hands shake a little as they trace over the deep black leather of a motorcycle vest, warm from being packaged and placed under the Christmas tree. His fingertips brush along metal eyelets as he touches the laced up sides, and his breath catches when he turns it over and finds angel wings sewn onto the back.

Rick clears his throat after a minute and says quietly, “I did the wings myself.”

Daryl’s head whips upward to look at him and in a choked voice, he asks quietly, “What? When?”

Rick smiles sheepishly. “That day I was supposed to have gone to my dad’s. I got there and found out he’s outta town or something, but I have a key to his house so I bought what I needed and did it at his place. With a lot of trouble and help from Google, mind you. But it’s okay if you don’t like it.”

Daryl shakes his head rapidly back and forth. “No, I love it. It’s… Rick, it’s perfect. For reasons I can’t even explain right now, this is everything.” He puts the gift aside and leans over, laying his head on Rick’s shoulder. “ _You_ are everything.”

For a long moment, there’s only the soft sound of breathing between them, and the radio in the kitchen loudly playing _Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas_. And then Rick stands, pulling Daryl to his feet and spinning him around, tugging him close and sliding one hand along his spine until he reaches his lower back. He holds out his other hand and Daryl takes it, grinning at him.

“So you can’t cook, but you can sew and you can dance. What other hidden talents you got?” 

Rick’s face turns thoughtful. “Hmm. I have one other thing I think I’m _really_ good at.”

“Oh?” Daryl asks. 

Rick nods, pulls Daryl even closer so that it’s hard for him to tell where he ends and Rick begins, and kisses him, soft and sweet and slow. It feels just like the first time. Daryl thinks it will feel like that every time. 

“You _are_ really good at that,” Daryl says against his lips, and Rick continues to move with him around the room, bare feet on carpet only causing a handful of stumbles. And when they turn one last time, Daryl catches a glimpse of Rick’s mom in the doorway to the living room, watching them, one hand pressed over her heart and tears in her eyes. Daryl feels himself blush and buries his face against Rick’s neck. “I love you,” he whispers against Rick’s skin, and as much as he will never tire of hearing the words, he will also never tire of saying them.

“I love _you_ ,” Rick replies, and Daryl feels the vibrations of sound in Rick’s throat against his lips, can almost feel them reverberating into his own body, and knows them to be, beyond even a shadow of a doubt, the highest form of truth he’s ever believed in or wanted to believe in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I came up with a little playlist for this fic. These are six songs (two for Rick, two for Daryl, and two for them together as a couple) that I think capture some of the feelings I tried to put into this fic. I’d love it if you listened to them! (That second Rick song in particular is something I’ve been digging the crap out of lately that I can’t get over how much it fits him in this fic, and the first song for the two of them is one that I think really captures the whole fic.) I couldn’t make it into an 8tracks mix as obviously it’s only 6 tracks, but I linked each song directly for convenience. Enjoy, and thank you all again for having stuck with me this long, especially since this is my first fic of this length for any fandom. You are all treasures and I love you all. <3
> 
>  **Rick songs** :  
> 1\. [Aquaman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaXz6DM5b9E) | Walk The Moon  
> 2\. [Surprise Yourself](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvHXggCrI0M) | Jack Garratt
> 
>  **Daryl songs** :  
> 1\. [These Waters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPLcfLCjbZ4) | Ben Howard  
> 2\. [Brand New](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqtuxo-Y1AA) | Ben Rector
> 
>  **Songs for both of them** :  
> 1\. [Falling Faster](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jue_QqBLNzs) | Andrew Ripp  
> 2\. [Higher Love](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oYw9Sx7JhQ) | Prides

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [love me (if that's what you wanna do) - Edit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9899423) by [PixieReedus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PixieReedus/pseuds/PixieReedus), [Rickyl_edits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rickyl_edits/pseuds/Rickyl_edits), [YeyaGrimes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/YeyaGrimes/pseuds/YeyaGrimes)




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